Here was a man capable of recollecting with precision every incident that had befallen him since his rescue, exhibiting shrewdness in conversation, and accuracy in matters of current fact. His intellect was as healthy as that of the healthiest-headed man who conversed with him, but up to the period of his rescue everything was in darkness. The conjectures which were offered him--so close to the mark some of them, that they brushed the very skirts of real facts, and told the truth by implication--conveyed no ideas. His eternal rejoinder was no more than a shake of the head. Had he been a sailor? Did he remember the port from which he sailed? the rig or name of the vessel? his native town? Such questions, and hundreds of them, were asked, but though he grasped familiar names with almost passionate eagerness, they established no faintest clue as to his real past. And then inquiries becoming at last no better than fruitless importunities, were dropped, and Holdsworth was considered incurable. Yet this could hardly have been thought, had those who gave in this opinion been conscious of the under-current of secret, but not the less powerful, yearnings, absolutely objectless, scarce owning definite forms, which yet the restless instincts of the man urged with greedy emphasis. These movements were, indeed, purely spiritual--the action of the soul groping in her cell and searching for that window of the mind which had been blackened, and through which no light could break. Of the mental torments this intellectual blindness occasioned, no words that I possess can describe the anguish. Month after month went by and still found him searching heart-brokenly in the gloom for some image, some substance, some sign, that should appease the piteous cravings of his instincts, _which knew all, but could not speak_. Whatever feminine tact could suggest to give light to his mind, Mr. Sherman’s sister did. She made out a long list of names beginning with H, trusting that one among them might be his, and that the sight of it would recall many things or all. But, long and patiently compiled as the list was, many names there must be which she would omit; and amongst them his own. Then she made out a list of the names of the ships; but here was an endless job, prosecuted for a long while with benevolent industry, and then abandoned in despair. She read the European papers carefully, hoping to find some account of the loss of the vessel in which, it was surmised, Holdsworth had been a passenger; but no such account ever rewarded her search. Numerous were the other remedies she resorted to, but none of them produced any result. A few months of such unavailing work would soon extinguish hope. Both she and her brother desisted at last from their merciful endeavours in the full and final conviction that nothing but the hand of God could ever draw aside the black curtain that hung over Holdsworth’s past. But not to dwell at needless length upon this part of the story: