“But it is hard on us,” she said; “he needs good food, and we can’t get it. I do all I can, but it’s not a great deal, for it pulls me down so. I feel tired all the time—when I go to bed at night, and when I get up in the morning.”
As she spoke Peter thought that her thin, worn face told her story even more pitifully than her words did.
It was quite late when they got through this visit, but the doctor walked with Peter all the way to his home, talking with him about his own ailment and telling him what he ought to do. “For,” he said, “the trouble with your eyes is a serious one which comes from something worse than poor spectacles, and is often more deeply seated even than the eye itself.”
As they parted he said:
“I want you to be at my office again at the same hour to-morrow afternoon.”
Peter was there at the time named, and the doctor took him in still another direction, to a street near the water. Here, entering a narrow but very high house, the doctor led him up a dark winding stair. It was so dark that Peter had to grope his way, for he could not see a step before him. They came at last to the garret, which the doctor entered without knocking. The windows of this room opened toward the river, and the masts of ships were visible rising above the roofs of the houses that stood between. A seaman’s chest, a chair and a broken, propped-up bedstead were all the furniture the room contained.
On the bed lay an old white-haired man. He had been a sailor, and his seamed and rugged face still told of his hard life upon the deck, and on the mast, amid wind and storm.