recollection of it.

When we reached Meurice's, I found Dupuytrien in waiting, who immediately
pronounced the main artery of the limb as wounded; and almost as
instantaneously proceeded to pass a ligature round it. This painful
business being concluded, I was placed upon a sofa, and being plentifully
supplied with lemonade, and enjoined to keep quiet, left to my own
meditations, such as they were, till evening--Trevanion having taken upon
him to apologize for our absence at Mrs. Bingham's dejeune, and O'Leary
being fast asleep in his own apartments.




CHAPTER XXXV.

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS--A FIRST LOVE.

I know of no sensations so very nearly alike, as those felt on awaking
after very sudden and profuse loss of blood, and those resulting from a
large dose of opium. The dizziness, the confusion, and the abstraction
at first, gradually yielding, as the senses became clearer, to a vague
and indistinct consciousness; then the strange mistiness, in which fact
and fiction are wrapped up--the confounding of persons, and places, and
times, not so as to embarrass and annoy--for the very debility you feel
subdues all irritation--but rather to present a panoramic picture of odd
and incongruous events more pleasing than otherwise.

Of the circumstances by which I was thus brought to a sick couch, I had
not even the most vague recollection--the faces and the dress of all