felt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn't
even remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for a
while, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and
close-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after which
he turned round and examined the body. He looked hard at the
revolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw no
more, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed;
and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to end
entirely.

I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly aware
of much commotion going on here and there in the house; and the
doctor came night and morning, and tended me carefully. I suppose I
may call him the doctor now, though at the time I didn't call him
so--I knew him merely as a visible figure. I don't believe I THOUGHT
at all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any known
language. They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession,
like a vague panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like the
sound of a foreign tongue. I attached no more importance to anything
they said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by the
rectory.

At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a
great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and
a clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone,
my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,--it's so hard not to
drop into the language of everyday life when one has to describe
things to other people,--my nurse got me up, with much ado and
solemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and
ugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and