" And Diana not long after unconsciously fulfilled Biah's
predictions.
Of late Biah's good offices had been in special requisition, as the
deacon had been for nearly a month on a sick bed with one of those
interminable attacks of typhus fever which used to prevail in old times,
when the doctor did everything he could to make it certain that a man
once brought down with sickness never should rise again.
But Silas Pitkin had a constitution derived through an indefinite
distance from a temperate, hard-working, godly ancestry, and so withstood
both death and the doctor, and was alive and in a convalescent state,
which gave hope of his being able to carve the turkey at his Thanksgiving
dinner.
The evening sunlight was just fading out of the little "keeping-room,"
adjoining the bed-room, where the convalescent now was able to sit up
most of the day. A cot bed had been placed there, designed for him to lie
down upon in intervals of fatigue. At present, however, he was sitting in
his arm-chair, complacently watching the blaze of the hickory fire, or
following placidly the motions of his wife's knitting-needles.
There was an air of calmness and repose on his thin, worn features that
never was there in days of old: the haggard, anxious lines had been
smoothed away, and that spiritual expression which sickness and sorrow
sometimes develops on the human face reigned in its place.
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