Mrs. Buck came for two or
three hours a day, but Lyddy was the self-installed angel of the house;
and before a week had passed the boy's thin arms were around her neck,
his head on her loving shoulder, and his cheek pressed against hers.
Anthony could hear them talk, as he sat in the kitchen busy at
his work. Musical instruments were still brought him to repair,
though less frequently than of yore, and he could still make
many parts of violins far better than his seeing competitors.
A friend and pupil sat by his side in the winter evenings
and supplemented his weakness, helping and learning alternately,
while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and despair.
The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted;
and though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's
breadth could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature
had been busy with her divine work of compensation.
The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods of new life and
vigor into the others. Touch became something more than the stupid,
empty grasp of things we seeing mortals know, and in place of the two
eyes he had lost he now had ten in every finger-tip.
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