her gray-haired husband, and spoke soothingly, as to an infant. His
mind was palsied with his body; its utmost energy was peevishness. In
a few months more, she helped him up the staircase, with a pause at
every step, and a longer one upon the landingplace, and a heavy glance
behind, as he crossed the threshold of his chamber. He knew, poor
man, that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his
world,--his world, his home, his tomb,--at once a dwelling and a
burial-place, till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But
Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her, in his daily
passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from
the weary chair to the joyless bed,--his bed and hers,--their
marriage-bed; till even this short journey ceased, and his head lay
all day upon the pillow, and hers all night beside it. How long poor
Mr. Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door,
and often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull
into the chamber, nodding to Rose, and pointing at her husband, but
still delayed to enter. "This bedridden wretch cannot escape me!"
quoth Death. "I will go forth, and run a race with the swift, and
fight a battle with the strong, and come back for Toothaker at my
leisure!" O, when the deliverer came so near in the dull anguish of
her worn-out sympathies, did she never long to cry, "Death, come in!"

But, no! We have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose.
She never failed in a wife's duty to her poor sick husband. She
murmured not, though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her
as him, nor answered peevishly, though his complaining accents roused
her from her sweetest dream, only to share his wretchedness. He knew
her faith, yet nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow
disease had chilled all his heart, save one lukewarm spot, which
Death's frozen fingers were searching for, his last words were, "What