Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ Can it be that the curse is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"
"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's life."
They walked out together, and the Doctor began: "She has lived a double being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell upon her in the dim period before consciousness. ”

“ He had known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and recollected the story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest when one of these sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not to disturb him; but he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried out that there must be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different meats, many who could not endure cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. ”

“ But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with some show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had become engrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman's life she inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her childhood and youth. ”

“ Sophy answered. "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is it?"
The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful look. He met her father on the stairs.
"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Veneer.
"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember, as never before?" ”

“ A very small matter might turn the balance which held life and death poised against each other. He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death to the scale of life, as she will often do if not rudely disturbed or interfered with.
Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village. ”

“ If he had known all the stories in the old books, he would have found that some have swooned and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that a stout soldier has been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of rue,--that cassia and even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in certain. individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be a poison to somebody.
"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find it."
Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment. ”

“ She can't live wi' it in the room!"
The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment, She came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. ”