What A Joy It Would Be To
Live For Ages In A World Of Such Fascinating Phenomena!
If some great
physician, wise beyond all others, infallible, had said to me that all
my doctors had been
Wrong, that, barring accidents, I had yet fifty
years to live, or forty, or even thirty, I should have worshipped him
and would have counted myself the happiest being on the globe, with so
many autumns and winters and springs and summers to see yet.
With these supernatural moonlight nights I finish the story of that
dark time, albeit the darkness had not yet gone; to have recalled it
and related it briefly as I could once in my life is enough. Let me
now go back to the simile of the lost wretch struggling for life in
the mangrove swamp. The first sense of having set my foot on a firmer
place in that slough of fetid slime, of a wholesome breath of air
blown to me from outside the shadow of the black abhorred forest, was
when I began to experience intervals of relief from physical pain,
when these grew more and more frequent and would extend to entire
days, then to weeks, and for a time I would become oblivious of my
precarious state. I was still and for a long time subject to attacks,
when the pain was intolerable and was like steel driven into my heart,
always followed by violent palpitations, which would last for hours.
But I found that exercise on foot or horseback made me no worse, and I
became more and more venturesome, spending most of my time out of
doors, although often troubled with the thought that my passion for
Nature was a hindrance to me, a turning aside from the difficult way I
had been striving to keep.
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