Sometimes my eyes had been tired, but I had not taken it seriously. One afternoon, as I laid out a sheet of paper on the desk, the page was suddenly obscured by a dancing spider-web—a dizzying contortion of black and white—growing denser and denser. I clapped my hands over my eyes and felt so sudden a relief I was afraid to take them away again. I got up slowly and felt my way with my foot to an easy chair. How long I sat there, my hands pressed hard against my eyes, I do not know. I had read somewhere of a man going blind with just such symptoms. It was fear unspeakable, fear that made me laugh. When one feels that the gods are witty it is a bad sign. I was suddenly calm. It was accepted. I thought for a few minutes, my eyes still shut, and then felt my way to the telephone. "Central," I said, and I remember that my voice was calm and commonplace. "Will you give me the Eye and Ear Hospital? I can’t look up the number. I’m blind." "Sure," came back the answer. "It must be hard to be blind." A clutch came to my throat. It comes to me now as I write about it, comes every time I hear people complaining that modern industry has robbed our life of all humanity, has turned us into mechanisms. Such talk makes me think of the sudden sympathy which came to me out of the machine. Whenever I am utterly blue and discouraged, I go into a telephone booth. "Hello, Central," I say, "tell me something cheerful. I’m down on my luck." It has never failed. Always some joking sympathy has come out of the machine and helped me to get right again. When the doctor came, he looked a minute at my desk, at the whole eye-straining mass of faded print and notes. He snapped on the electric light. "I suppose you work a lot in this fiendish glare?" "I need a strong light," I said. He grunted in disgust. "This will hurt," he said, as he made me sit down near the electric light, "but you’ve got to bear it." He fixed a little mirror on his forehead and flashed the cruel ray into my eye. Back somewhere in the brain it focussed and burned. The sweat broke out all over me. "Now the other eye." I flinched for a moment, holding my hand before it. "Come, come," he said gruffly, and I took my hand away. When the ordeal was over, he tied a black bandage over my eyes, laid me down on the lounge and lectured me. When he stopped for breath, I interrupted. "What hope is there?" He hesitated. "Oh! Tell me the truth." "Well—I guess the chances are even—of your seeing enough for ordinary work. But they will never be strong. You’ll have to give up books. You must keep your eyes bandaged—complete rest—six weeks—then we can tell how much damage you’ve done. It is only a guess now." We talked business. I had enough money saved for a private room and good treatment, so he put me into a cab and told the driver to deliver me at the hospital.