In the second (Junior) year of his college life, he was dining one day with the other undergraduates in the Commons Hall. During these meals, so long as any college officers were present, decorum usually reigned; but when the dons had left the room, the students frequently wound up by what, in modern student phrase, would be described as "rough-house." There were singing and shouting and frequently some boisterous scuffling, such as is natural among a lot of healthy young barbarians. On this particular occasion, as Prescott was leaving the hall, he heard a sudden outbreak and looked around to learn its cause. Missiles were flying about; and, just as he turned his head, a large hard crust of bread struck him squarely in the open eye. The shock was great, resembling a concussion of the brain, and Prescott fell unconscious. He was taken to his father's house, where, on recovering consciousness, he evinced extreme prostration, with nausea, a fluttering pulse, and all the evidences of physical collapse. So weak was he that he could not even sit upright in his bed. For several weeks unbroken rest was ordered, so that nature, aided by a vigorous constitution, might repair the injury which his system had sustained. When he returned to Cambridge, the sight of the injured eye (the left one) was gone forever. Oddly enough, in view of the severity of the blow, the organ was not disfigured, and only through powerful lenses could even the slightest difference be detected between it and the unhurt eye. Dr. James Jackson, who attended Prescott at this time, described the case as one of paralysis of the retina, for which no remedy was possible. This accident, with the consequences which it entailed, was to have a profound effect not only upon the whole of Prescott's subsequent career, but upon his character as well. His affliction, indeed, is inseparably associated with his work, and it must again and again be referred to, both because it was continually in his thoughts and because it makes the record of his literary achievement the more remarkable. Incidentally, it afforded a revelation of one of Prescott's noblest traits,—his magnanimity. He was well aware of the identity of the person to whom he owed this physical calamity. Yet, knowing as he did that the whole thing was in reality an accident, he let it be supposed that he had no knowledge of the person and that the mishap had come about in such a way that the responsibility for it could not be fixed. As a matter of fact, the thing had been done unintentionally; yet this cannot excuse its perpetrator for never expressing to Prescott his regret and sympathy. Years afterwards, Prescott spoke of this man to Ticknor in the kindest and most friendly fashion, and once he was able to confer on him a signal favour, which he did most readily and with sincere cordiality.

Prescott returned to the University in a mood of seriousness, which showed forth the qualities inherited from his father. Hitherto he had been essentially his mother's son, with all her gayety and mirthfulness and joy of life. Henceforth he was to exhibit more and more the strength of will and power of application which had made his father so honoured and so influential. Not that he let his grave misfortune cloud his spirits. He had still the use of his uninjured eye, and he had recovered from his temporary physical prostration; but he now went about his work in a different spirit, and was resolved to win at least an honourable rank for scholarship. In the classics and in English he studied hard, and he overcame to some extent his aversion to philosophy and logic. Mathematics, however, still remained the bane of his academic existence. For a time he used to memorise word for word all the mathematical demonstrations as he found them in the text-books, without the slightest comprehension of what they meant; and his remarkable memory enabled him to reproduce them in the class room, so that the professor of mathematics imagined him to be a promising disciple. This fact does not greatly redound to the acumen of the professor nor to the credit of his class-room methods, and what followed gives a curious notion of the easy-going system which then prevailed. Prescott found the continual exertion of his memory a good deal of a bore. To his candid nature it also savoured of deception. He, therefore, very frankly explained to the professor the secret of his mathematical facility. He said that, if required, he would continue to memorise the work, but that he knew it to be for him nothing but a waste of time, and he asked, with much naïveté, that he might be allowed to use his leisure to better advantage. This most ingenuous request must have amused the gentleman of whom it was made; but it proved to be effectual. Prescott was required to attend all the mathematical exercises conscientiously, but from that day he was never called upon to recite. For the rest, his diligence in those studies which he really liked won him the respect of the faculty at large. At graduation he received as a commencement honour the assignment of a Latin poem, which he duly declaimed to a crowded audience in the old "meeting-house" at Cambridge, in August, 1814. This poem was in Latin elegiacs, and was an apostrophe to Hope (Ad Spem), of which, unfortunately, no copy has been preserved. At the same time, Prescott was admitted to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa, from which a single blackball was sufficient to exclude a candidate. His father celebrated these double honours by giving an elaborate dinner, in a pavilion, to more than five hundred of the family's acquaintances.

Prescott had now to make his choice of a profession; for to a New Englander of those days every man, however wealthy, was expected to have a definite occupation. Very naturally he decided upon the law, and began the study of it in his father's office, though it was evident enough from the first that to his taste the tomes of Blackstone made no very strong appeal. He loved rather to go back to his classical reading and to enlarge his knowledge of modern literature. Indeed, his legal studies were treated rather cavalierly, and it is certain that had he ever been admitted to the bar, he would have found no pleasure in the routine of a lawyer's practice. Fate once more intervened, though, as before, in an unpleasant guise. In January, 1815, a painful inflammation appeared in his right eye—the one that had not been injured. This inflammation increased so rapidly as to leave Prescott for the time completely blind. Nor was the disorder merely local. A fever set in with a high pulse and a general disturbance of the system. Prescott's suffering was intense for several days; and at the end of a week, when the local inflammation had passed away, the retina of the right eye was found to be so seriously affected as to threaten a permanent loss of sight. At the same time, symptoms of acute rheumatism appeared in the knee-joints and in the neck. For several months the patient's condition was pitiable. Again and again there was a recurrence of the inflammation in the eye, alternating with the rheumatic symptoms, so that for sixteen weeks Prescott was unable to leave his room, which had to be darkened almost into blackness. Medical skill availed very little, and no doubt the copious blood-letting which was demanded by the practice of that time served only to deplete the patient's strength. Through all these weary months, however, Prescott bore his sufferings with indomitable courage, and to those friends of his who groped their way through the darkness to his bedside he was always cheerful, animated, and even gay, talking very little of his personal affliction and showing a hearty interest in the concerns of others. When autumn came it was decided that he should take a sea voyage, partly to invigorate his constitution and partly to enable him to consult the most eminent specialists of France and England. First of all, however, he planned to visit his grandfather, Mr. Thomas Hickling, who, as has been already mentioned, was American consul at the island of St. Michael's in the Azores, where it was thought the mildness of the climate might prove beneficial.

Prescott set out, on September 26th of the same year (1815), in one of the small sailing vessels which plied between Boston and the West African islands. The voyage occupied twenty-two days, during which time Prescott had a recurrence both of his rheumatic pains and of the inflammatory condition of his eye. His discomfort was enhanced by the wretchedness of his accommodations—a gloomy little cabin into which water continually trickled from the deck, and in which the somewhat fastidious youth was forced to live upon nauseous messes of rye pudding sprinkled with coarse salt. Cockroaches and other vermin swarmed about him; and it must have been with keen pleasure that he exchanged this floating prison for the charming villa in the Azores, where his grandfather had made his home in the midst of groves and gardens, blooming with a semi-tropical vegetation. Mr. Hickling, during his long residence at St. Michael's, had married a Portuguese lady for his second wife, and his family received Prescott with unstinted cordiality. The change from the bleak shores of New England to the laurels and myrtles and roses of the Azores delighted Prescott, and so appealed to his sense of beauty that he wrote home long and enthusiastic letters. But his unstinted enjoyment of this Hesperian paradise lasted for little more than two short weeks. He had landed on the 18th of October, and by November 1st he had gone back to his old imprisonment in darkness, living on a meagre diet and smarting under the blisters which were used as a counter-irritant to the rheumatic inflammation. As usual, however, his cheerfulness was unabated. He passed his time in singing, in chatting with his friends, and in walking hundreds of miles around his darkened room. He remained in this seclusion from November to February, when his health once more improved; and two months later, on the 8th of April, 1816, he took passage from St. Michael's for London. The sea voyage and its attendant discomforts had their usual effect, and during twenty-two out of the twenty-four days, to which his weary journey was prolonged, he was confined to his cabin.

On reaching London his case was very carefully diagnosed by three of the most eminent English specialists, Dr. Farre, Sir William Adams, and Mr. (afterward Sir) Astley Cooper. Their verdict was not encouraging, for they decided that no local treatment of his eyes could be of any particular advantage, and that the condition of the right eye would always depend very largely upon the general condition of his system. They prescribed for him, however, and he followed out their regimen with conscientious scrupulosity. After a three months' stay in London, he crossed the Channel and took up his abode in Paris. In England, owing to his affliction, he had been able to do and see but little, because he was forbidden to leave his room after nightfall, and of course he could not visit the theatre or meet the many interesting persons to whom Mr. John Quincy Adams, then American Minister to England, offered to present him. Something he saw of the art collections of London, and he was especially impressed by the Elgin Marbles and Raphael's cartoons. There was a touch of pathos in the wistful way in which he paused in the booksellers' shops and longingly turned over rare editions of the classics which it was forbidden him to read. "When I look into a Greek or Latin book," he wrote to his father, "I experience much the same sensation as does one who looks on the face of a dead friend, and the tears not infrequently steal into my eyes." In Paris he remained two months, and passed the following winter in Italy, making a somewhat extended tour, and visiting the most famous of the Italian cities in company with an old schoolmate. Thence he returned to Paris, where once more he had a grievous attack of his malady; and at last, in May of 1817, he again reached London, embarking not long after for the United States. Before leaving England on this second visit, he had explored Oxford and Cambridge, which interested him extremely, but which he was glad to leave in order to be once more at home.

CHAPTER III
THE CHOICE OF A CAREER

PRESCOTT'S return to his home brought him face to face with the perplexing question of his future. During his two years of absence this question must often have been forced upon his mind, especially during those weary weeks when the darkness of his sick-room and the lack of any mental diversion threw him in upon himself and left him often with his own thoughts for company. Even to his optimistic temperament the future may well have seemed a gloomy one. Half-blind and always dreading the return of a painful malady, what was it possible for him to do in the world whose stir and movement and boundless opportunity had so much attracted him? Must he spend his years as a recluse, shut out from any real share in the active duties of life? Little as he was wont to dwell upon his own anxieties, he could not remain wholly silent concerning a subject so vital to his happiness. In a letter to his father, written from St. Michael's not long before he set out for London, he broached very briefly a subject that must have been very often in his thoughts.

"The most unpleasant of my reflections suggested by this late inflammation are those arising from the probable necessity of abandoning a profession congenial with my taste and recommended by such favourable opportunities, and adopting one for which I am ill qualified and have but little inclination. It is some consolation that this latter alternative, should my eyes permit, will afford me more leisure for the pursuit of my favourite studies. But on this subject I shall consult my physician and will write you his opinion."

Apparently at this time he still cherished the hope of entering upon some sort of a professional career, even though the practice of the law were closed to him. But after the discouraging verdict of the London specialists had been made known, he took a more despondent view. He wrote:—

"As to the future, it is too evident I shall never be able to pursue a profession. God knows how poorly I am qualified and how little inclined to be a merchant. Indeed, I am sadly puzzled to think how I shall succeed even in this without eyes."