“Yes; and my ears and my hands too. It would be no good tying my feet, when I don’t know one big toe from the other.”
And she laughed merrily.
“We’ll try to keep up the talk all the way, so that you sha’n’t weary of the journey.”
“You’re going to carry me somewhere with my eyes tied up. O! how jolly! And then I shall see something all at once! Jolly! jolly!—Getting tired!” she repeated. “Even the wind on my face would be pleasure enough for half a day. I sha’n’t get tired so soon as you will—you dear, kind papa! I am afraid I shall be dreadfully heavy. But I sha’n’t jerk your arms much. I will lie so still!”
“And you won’t mind letting Mr. Percivale help me to carry you?”
“No. Why should I, if he doesn’t mind it? He looks strong enough; and I am sure he is nice, and won’t think me heavier than I am.”
“Very well, then. I will send mamma and Wynnie to dress you at once; and we shall set out as soon as you are ready.”
She clapped her hands with delight, then caught me round the neck and gave me one of my own kisses as she called the best she had, and began to call as loud as she could on her mamma and Wynnie to come and dress her.
It was indeed a glorious morning. The wind came in little wafts, like veins of cool white silver amid the great, warm, yellow gold of the sunshine. The sea lay before us a mound of blue closing up the end of the valley, as if overpowered into quietness by the lordliness of the sun overhead; and the hills between which we went lay like great sheep, with green wool, basking in the blissful heat. The gleam from the waters came up the pass; the grand castle crowned the left-hand steep, seeming to warm its old bones, like the ruins of some awful megatherium in the lighted air; one white sail sped like a glad thought across the spandrel of the sea; the shadows of the rocks lay over our path, like transient, cool, benignant deaths, through which we had to pass again and again to yet higher glory beyond; and one lark was somewhere in whose little breast the whole world was reflected as in the convex mirror of a dewdrop, where it swelled so that he could not hold it, but let it out again through his throat, metamorphosed into music, which he poured forth over all as the libation on the outspread altar of worship.
And of all this we talked to Connie as we went; and every now and then she would clap her hands gently in the fulness of her delight, although she beheld the splendour only as with her ears, or from the kisses of the wind on her cheeks. But she seemed, since her accident, to have approached that condition which Milton represents Samson as longing for in his blindness, wherein the sight should be