The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 201: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

194 The Little Girl, Now a Woman. and yet it was lonelier than sad. At an early age he had been taken with a disease which had left him nearly deaf. No sooner had he recovered from his sickness than he began another fight with disease—consumption. In a comic manner that was pathetic, he told me that night of his illness and of the “cheerful words” his friends gave him. His uncle especially amused him with the doletful remark: “You may get well—in fact, [ think you will; but you had better be a very good boy!” which he repeated at the close of every visit. And when he went on to relate how he left home, determined to support himself, how he lived his solitary life, although in the same village with his father and step-mother, of his struggles and failures, I felt something tugging in my breast, and grew ashamed of what I had considered trouble. It is always so. ‘There are in every village, no matter how small, characters whom God has made for daily les- sons to the unsatisfied ones—persons bearing such heavy burdens so manfully that we grow ashamed of our own complaining and dare not speak of our own little crosses to them. “T have always tried to get a little ahead,” he said in his low, thin voice; “but it seems as though I cannot. I used to think I would some time go to college, and I worked hard to do so—but—I had to give it up.” I knew Tom was considered quite a genius in his own way, but I had not expected to hear this from him. “That was the hardest cross of my life,” he continued Gomicbook (E (0) ee. | ae