Cold, and
bitter, and clear was the starry night, when the weary Gotleib
issued out of the Herr professor's warm house to answer the late
call of a sick woman. Gotleib looked up into those illimitable
depths where earths and suns hang suspended, to appeal to the
material perceptions of man that this is not the alone world--the
alone existence. The silent bright stars comforted the earth-wearied
heart in which the day's toil had dimmed the spirit's perception.
Gotleib stepped on bravely through the frosty darkness, and said
hopefully to himself,
"There is yet another world--another life than this."
And now he stood before the house in which his services were needed.
He entered a chamber, whose bare poverty reminded him of his student
days. But far sadder was cold poverty here, for a lady lay on a hard
couch before the scantily furnished grate, and her hollow cough, and
the oozing blood that saturated her white handkerchief, rendered all
words unnecessary.
A young girl, with blanched cheek and tearless eye of agony, knelt
by the wan sufferer. Gotleib felt himself in the sphere of his
life's use; cold and fatigue were alike gone. The sick and almost
dying woman seemed to revive under his touch--it was as if strength
flowed from the physician into the patient.
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