Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic by George Moore
page 72 of 83 (86%)
weeks: for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room. It was a
year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could
sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost
entirely destroyed, and consequently that her taste was much blunted.

It was not until four years of age that the poor child's bodily health
seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of
life and the world. But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the
silence of the tomb were around her;--no mother's smile called forth her
answering smile; no father's voice taught her to imitate his sounds:
brothers and sisters were but forms of matter which resisted not her
touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house save in
warmth and in the power of locomotion, and not even in these respects
from the dog and the cat.

But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could not
die, nor be maimed, nor mutilated; and, though most of its avenues of
communication with the world were cut off, it began to manifest itself
through the others. As soon, as she could walk she began to explore the
room, and then the house. She became familiar with the form, density,
weight, and heat of every article she could lay her hands upon. She
followed her mother, and felt her hands and arms as she was occupied
about the house; and her disposition to imitate led her to do everything
herself. She even learned to sew a little, and knit. The reader need
scarcely be told, however, that the opportunities of communicating with
her were very, very limited, and that the moral effects of her wretched
state soon began to appear. Those who cannot be enlightened by reason
can only be controlled by force; and this, coupled with her great
privations, must soon have reduced her to a worse condition than that of
the beasts that perish, but for timely and unhoped-for aid. At this time
DigitalOcean Referral Badge