I knew once what it was to be blind.  I shall never forget that experience.  I have been as blind as anybody ever was for three or four hours, and the sufferings that I endured and the mishaps and the accidents that are burning in my memory make my sympathy rise when I feel for the blind and always shall feel.  I once went to Heidelberg on an excursion.  I took a clergyman along with me, the Rev. Joseph Twichell, of Hartford, who is still among the living despite that fact.  I always travel with clergymen when I can.  It is better for them, it is better for me.  And any preacher who goes out with me in stormy weather and without a lightning rod is a good one.  The Reverend Twichell is one of those people filled with patience and endurance, two good ingredients for a man travelling with me, so we got along very well together.  In that old town they have not altered a house nor built one in 1500 years.  We went to the inn and they placed Twichell and me in a most colossal bedroom, the largest I ever saw or heard of.  It was as big as this room.

I didn’t take much notice of the place.  I didn’t really get my bearings.  I noticed Twichell got a German bed about two feet wide, the kind in which you’ve got to lie on your edge, because there isn’t room to lie on your back, and he was way down south in that big room, and I was way up north at the other end of it, with a regular Sahara in between.

We went to bed.  Twichell went to sleep, but then he had his conscience loaded and it was easy for him to get to sleep.  I couldn’t get to sleep.  It was one of those torturing kinds of lovely summer nights when you hear various kinds of noises now and then.  A mouse away off in the southwest.  You throw things at the mouse.  That encourages the mouse.  But I couldn’t stand it, and about two o’clock I got up and thought I would give it up and go out in the square where there was one of those tinkling fountains, and sit on its brink and dream, full of romance.

I got out of bed, and I ought to have lit a candle, but I didn’t think of it until it was too late.  It was the darkest place that ever was.  There has never been darkness any thicker than that.  It just lay in cakes.

I thought that before dressing I would accumulate my clothes.  I pawed around in the dark and found everything packed together on the floor except one sock.  I couldn’t get on the track of that sock.  It might have occurred to me that maybe it was in the wash.  But I didn’t think of that.  I went excursioning on my hands and knees.  Presently I thought, “I am never going to find it; I’ll go back to bed again.”  That is what I tried to do during the next three hours.  I had lost the bearings of that bed.  I was going in the wrong direction all the time.  By-and-by I came in collision with a chair and that encouraged me.