Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/18

8 At last one blessed Sunday, there came to the hospital a young lady who spoke German. At the first sound of the broken syllables, she went quickly to his bedside, and saying to the nurse, "I can speak to this poor fellow in his own language;" she said a few words to Karl in German. The effect was magical.

He lifted himself up suddenly in bed, and exclaiming "Ach mein Gott," poured out such a flood of incoherent, grateful, bewildered German that the best of scholars need not have been ashamed at failing to comprehend him. Karl had found a friend. Every day she went to see him,—carried him the food he needed, found out from him the names of his friends, and wrote letters to them in German.

One day he said to her: "You cannot be my girl of the four leaf of clover. You have eyes like the heaven, like mine; but her eyes were like eyes of a deer that is afraid."

Then he told the story of the clover, and showed her the creased and faded leaf.

It seemed almost a miracle that the fragile, crumbling little thing should not have been lost to all these months. But no Roman Catholic devotee ever clung more superstitiously to a relic than did Karl Reutner to his "four leaf of clover."

Often in his delirious attacks he would call for it, and not be pacified until the nurses, who had learnt to humor the whim, would put the paper