Explore "Wayfaring Men" by Edna Lyall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"So, from the pinched soil of a churlish fate, True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth, And between earth and heaven stand simply great, That these shall seem but their attendants both. " Lowell.
For some days Ralph gave his new friends a good deal of anxiety; no doubt the worry and the underfeeding of the past nine months had told upon him, and culminating in this week of hardship and exposure had left him very ill-fitted to resist the modern plague which was scourging the country. By the time he had turned the corner and was able to spend part of each day in the adjoining room, he had wound himself very closely about the hearts both of the mother and the son. For there was something in his blithe cheerfulness which was very winning and which not even the depression that always accompanies influenza could affect for very long, any more than Sir Matthew Mactavish's treatment could really embitter his nature, though it occasionally made him speak a few cynical words.