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 void darkness of old; it
is filled with changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying
forms, rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.
Even when the handkerchief is passed over them, the once sightless
eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as they were before.

It was so with my mental vision. After the utter oblivion and darkness
of a deep swoon, consciousness flashed like light on my mind, when I
found myself in my father's presence, and in my own home. But, almost
at the very moment when I first awakened to the bewildering influence
of that sight, a new darkness fell upon my faculties--a darkness, this
time, which was not utter oblivion; a peopled darkness, like that
which the bandage casts over the opened eyes of the blind.