y discernible in the obscurity
beyond. I hid my face in my hands, and tried to assure myself that I was
still in possession of my senses. I strove hard to separate my thoughts;
to distinguish between my recollections; to extricate from the confusion
within me any one idea, no matter what--and I could not do it. In that
awful struggle for the mastery over my own mind, all that had passed,
all the horror of that horrible night, became as nothing to me. I
raised myself, and looked up again, and tried to steady my reason by
the simplest means--even by endeavouring to count all the houses within
sight. The darkness bewildered me. Darkness?--_Was_ it dark? or was day
breaking yonder, far away in the murky eastern sky? Did I know what I
saw? Did I see the same thing for a few moments together? What was this
under me? Grass? yes! cold, soft, dewy grass. I bent down my forehead
upon it, and tried, for the last time, to steady my faculties by
praying; tried if I could utter the prayer which I had known and
repeated every day from childhood--the Lord's Prayer. The Divine Words
came not at my call--no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end!
I started up on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my
eyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining
down out of it on my head; then a rayless darkness--the darkness of the
blind--then God's mercy at last--the mercy of utter oblivion.

* * * * *

When I recovered my consciousness, I was lying on the couch in my own
study. My father was supporting me on the pillow; the doctor had his
fingers on my pulse; and a policeman was telling them where he had found
me, and how he had brought me home.

PART III.

I.

WHEN the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, the same
succouring hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately
shuts out the bright prospect again, for a time. A bandage is passed
over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness of the recovered sense, it
should be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to
light. But between the awful blank of total privation of vision, and
the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the widest
difference. In the moment of their restoration, the blind have had
one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of
brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The
new darkness is not like the v