The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

OR THE LAST TENANT. 71
such medicines as her skill dictated. This skill was singularly
enough exercised in the surrounding hamlets, where
the poor folks came from far and near to get cured of every
manner of complaint by the wonderfully efficacious touch
of the good doctress. Even those who were disposed to
ridicule her curative power, and question with pious awe
the source from whence these miracles were wrought, could
not deny the factI that the diseased were made whole,
and that the simple prescriptions of Hannah Morrison
acted upon suffering creatures whom the learned alDong
the medical faculty had pronounced incurable, even as the
waters of Jordan worked on the frame of the leper in tbe
days when Jesus of Nazareth bade the dead arise in the
name of the living God.
For the honor of human nature we might suppress the
odium, instead of gratitude, which followed most of these
exhibitions of the kind Hannah's inspiration; but when
we remember that they whom Jesus devoted his life to
healing, teaching, and henefiting, condemned their Saviour
to an ignominious and shameful death, we cannot wonder
that the epithet of witch, and isolation from all human
companionship but such as she dwelt among, were the
only rewards which the poor physician ever received for
her bounteous gifts of health and strength diffused with
generous willingness to all who sought her aid. The exceptions
to her singular faculty of healing were, alas!
among those whom she would have given her own life to
benefit. On the family of her protectors there scemed to
hang a doom which no human skill or foresight could avert.
One by one they sunk beneath the fell ravages of consumption.
In vain did the unhappy Hannah nurse, and pet,
and caress the little ones whom, as the children of her beloved
Alice, she cherished as her own heart's core. She