Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head and
shoulders a little; but if you don't mind her you'll have a backset, and
the devil himself wouldn't engage to cure you."

The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days,
when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, "as a matter of
form;" but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and,
in a tender tone--need we say it? He had come to tell Joseph that his
father, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second--a longer--voyage,
to shores where there could be no disappointments and no
fevers, forever.

"And, Frowenfeld," he said, at the end of their long and painful talk,
"if there is any blame attached to not letting you go with them, I think
I can take part of it; but if you ever want a friend,--one who is
courteous to strangers and ill-mannered only to those he likes,--you can
call for Charlie Keene. I'll drop in to see you, anyhow, from time to
time, till you get stronger. I have taken a heap of trouble to keep you
alive, and if you should relapse now and give us the slip, it would be a
deal of good physic wasted; so keep in the house."

The polite neighbors who lifted their cocked hats to Joseph, as he spent
a slow convalescence just within his open door, were not bound to know
how or when he might have suffered. There were no "Howards" or
"Y.M.C.A.'s" in those days; no "Peabody Reliefs." Even had the neighbors
chosen to take cognizance of those bereavements, they were not so
unusual as to fix upon him any extraordinary interests an object of
sight; and he was beginning most distressfully to realize that "great
solitude" which the philosopher attributes to towns, when matters took a
decided turn.