Not all my exhaustion and debility—­nor even the acute pain I was suffering, could prevent my laughing at O’Leary’s adventure; and it required all Trevanion’s prudence to prevent my indulging too far in my 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 those I had lately seen were vividly before me; but how, and for what purpose I knew not.  Something in their kindness and attention had left an agreeable impression upon my mind, and without being able, or even attempting to trace it, I felt happy in the thought.  While thus the “hour before” was dim and indistinct, the events of years past were vividly and brightly pictured before me; and strange, too, the more remote the period, the more did it seem palpable and present to my imagination.  For so it is, there is in memory a species of mental long-sightedness, which, though blind to the object close beside you, can reach the blue mountains and the starry skies, which lie full many a league away.  Is this a malady? or is it rather a providential gift to alleviate the tedious hours of the sick bed, and cheer the lonely sufferer, whose thoughts are his only realm?

My school-boy days, in all their holiday excitement; the bank where I had culled the earliest cowslips of the year; the clear but rapid stream, where days long I have watched the speckled trout, as they swam peacefully beneath, or shook their bright fins in the gay sunshine; the gorgeous dragon-fly that played above the water, and dipped his bright wings in its ripple—­they were all before me.  And then came the thought of school itself, with its little