They were most of them creatures of intelligence and sensitiveness above the average of the hospital patient; their eyes shone between their long lashes with a light that may have been taken for that of inspiration in those of dead poets; even in the later stages of the disease, when their strength would hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats or attacks of hæmorrhage that left them transparent and exhausted—even then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found them the most pitiful of all his patients. The _spes phthisica_ seemed to him the most pathetic as well as the most merciful of illusions. In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in particular, a boy, the son of labouring parents whom heredity and circumstance alike had marked down from the day of his birth to be a victim of the disease. His mother and two sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been spent in a labourer’s cottage made deadly by the family’s infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley. As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air that he would have breathed on the way to the village school. He had lived, as far as Edwin could make out, in the single room in which his mother had lain dying, and had learned to read and write at her side. Then she had died; and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on the farm where his father was employed, an occupation that might well have saved him if the work and the exposure had not been too severe, or if he had not returned at night to the infected hovel. As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened. He was only fifteen. Education had never come his way, and he had never read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible; but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and make the necessary report of progress—fallacious word—upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing. His confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed Edwin what he had been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses composed, for the most part, in the jingling measures of Moody and Sankey’s hymns. They were sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled them with splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed to Edwin to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklings of that far hill country bore to the full stream of Severn. Their banalities, faintly imitated from the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.