So the days went in cloud and wind. The owners of the Feather’d been looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors afloat; and nobody mentioned Dan’s name, unless they tripped. I went glowering like a wild thing. I knew I’d never see Dan now nor hear his voice again, but I hated the Lord that had done it, and I made my heart like the nether millstone. I used to try and get out of folks’s sight; and roaming about the back streets one day, as the snow went off, I stumbled on Miss Catharine. “Old Miss Catharine” everybody called her, though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins. Eighty years had withered her,——a little woman at best, and now bent so that her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn’t lift them, and she never saw the sky. Her face to the ground as no beast’s face is turned even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would throw herself back, and so get a glimpse of her way and go on. I looked after her, and for the first time in weeks my heart ached for somebody beside myself. The next day mother sent me with a dish to Miss Catharine’s room, and I went in and sat down. I didn’t like her at first; she’d got a way of looking sidelong that gave her an evil air; but soon she tilted herself backward, and I saw her face,——such a happy one! “What’s the matter of ye, honey?” said she. “D’ye read your Bible?” Read my Bible! “Is that what makes you happy, Miss Catharine?” I asked. “Well, I can’t read much myself,——I don’t know the letters,” says she; “but I’ve got the blessed promises in my heart.” “Do you want me to read to you?” “No, not to-day. Next time you come, maybe.” So I sat awhile and listened to her little humming voice, and we fell to talking about mother’s ailments, and she said how fine it would be, if we could only afford to take mother to Bethesda. “There’s no angel there now,” said I. “I know it, dear,——but then——there might be, you know. At any rate, there’s always the living waters running to make us whole: I often think of that.” “And what else do you think of, Miss Catharine?” “Me?” said she. “O, I ha’n’t got no husband nor no child to think about and hope for, and so I think of myself, and what I should like, honey. And sometimes I remember them varses,——here! you read ’em now,——Luke xiii. 11.” So I read:—— “And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, ‘Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.”