“Shall I feel that pleasure?”

“Often and often, I have no doubt; every time you can willingly give up your wish to be a soldier or a sailor, or anything else you have set your mind upon, you will feel that pleasure.  But I do not expect it of you yet.  I dare say it was long a bitter thing to Beethoven to see hundreds of people in raptures with his music, when he could not hear a note of it.”

7.  “But did he ever smile again?” asked Hugh.

“If he did, he was happier than all the fine music in the world could have made him,” replied his mother.

“I wonder, oh, I wonder, if I shall ever feel so!”

“We will pray to God that you may.  Shall we ask him now?” Hugh clasped his hands.  His mother kneeled beside the bed, and, in a very few words, prayed that Hugh might be able to bear his misfortune well, and that his friends might give him such help and comfort as God should approve.

8.  Hugh found himself subject to very painful feelings sometimes, such as no one quite understood, and such as he feared no one was able to pity as they deserved.  On one occasion, when he had been quite merry for a while, and his mother and his sister Agnes were chatting, they thought they heard a sob from the sofa.  They spoke to Hugh, and found that he was indeed crying bitterly.

“What is it, my dear?” said his mother.  “Agnes, have we said anything that could hurt his feelings?”

“No, no,” sobbed Hugh.  “I will tell you, presently.”

9.  And, presently, he told them that he was so busy listening to what they said that he forgot everything else, when he felt as if something had gotten between two of his toes; unconsciously he put down his hand as if his foot were there!  Nothing could be plainer than the feeling in his toes; and then, when he put out his hand, and found nothing, it was so terrible, it startled him so!  It was a comfort to find that his mother knew about this.  She came, and kneeled by his sofa, and told him that many persons who had lost a limb considered this the most painful thing they had to bear for some time; but that, though the feeling would return occasionally through life, it would cease to be painful.

10.  Hugh was very much dejected, and when he thought of the months and years to the end of his life, and that he should never run and play, and never be like other people, he almost wished that he were dead.

Agnes thought that he must be miserable indeed if he could venture to say this to his mother.  She glanced at her mother’s face, but there was no displeasure there.  On the contrary, she said this feeling was very natural.  She had felt it herself under smaller misfortunes than Hugh’s; but she had found, though the prospect appeared all strewn with troubles, that they came singly, and were not so hard to bear, after all.

11.  She told Hugh that when she was a little girl she was very lazy, fond of her bed, and not at all fond of dressing or washing.