"Now good bye, Miss Valence. But I would recommend you not to play with your paints so. There is an effluvium from them."
"Oh, what can I do, what am I to do to pass the endless night? I was only trying to build a house in the dark."
"Sleep as much as you can. I am giving you gentle opiates. When you can sleep no longer, let Mrs. Shelfer talk or read to you, and have a little music. I will lend you my musical box, which plays twenty-four tunes: have it in the next room, not to be too loud. And then play on the musical glasses, not too long at a time: you will soon find out how to do that in the dark."
He most kindly sent us both the boxes that very day; and many a weary hour they lightened of its load. Poor Isola came every day to inquire, and several times she had her brother with her. She made an entire conquest of Mrs. Shelfer, who even gave her a choice canary bird. I was never tired of hearing the little woman's description of her beauty, and her visit to the kitchen formed the chief event of the day. Mrs. Shelfer (who had Irish blood in her veins) used to declare that the ground was not good enough for them to walk on.
"Such a pair, Miss! To see her so light, and soft, and loving, tripping along, and such eyes and such fur; and him walking so straight, and brave, and noble. I am sure you'd go a mile, Miss, to see him walk."
"You forget, Mrs. Shelfer, I may never enjoy that pleasure."
"No, no. Quite true, my good friend. But then we may, all the same."
Exactly so. There lay all the difference to me, but none to any other. This set me moralising in my shallow way, a thing by no means natural to me, who was so concentrated and subjective. But loss of sight had done me good, had turned the mind's eye inward into the darkness of myself. I think the blind, as a general rule, are less narrow-minded than those endowed with sight. Less inclined, I mean, to judge their neighbours harshly, less arrogant in exacting that every pulse keep time with their own. If eyes are but the chinks through which we focus on our brain censoriousness and bigotry, if rays of light are shafts and lances of ill will; then better is it to have no crystalline lens. Far better to be blind, than print the world-distorted puppets of myself. I, that smallest speck of dust, blown upon the shore of time, blown off when my puff shall come; a speck ignored by moon and stars; too small (however my ambition leap) for earth to itch, whate'er I suck; and yet a speck that is a mountain in the telescope of God; shall I never learn that His is my only magnitude; shall I wriggle to be all in all to my own corpuscle?
CHAPTER IV.
Is there any Mocha stone, fortification agate, or Scotch pebble, with half the veins and mottlings, angles, flux and reflux, that chequer one minute of the human mind? Was ever machine invented to throw so many shuttles?