Moments return to my memory of surpassing, unspeakable sweetness, which penetrated through all pain: being lifted in his arms, handled like a child; seeing his eyes, which seemed to hold and surround me like his arms; and hearing his words as when he thanked God, over and over again, and almost like one demented, for having caused him to study medicine. I felt I was re-entering life upon the strong, full tide of incomparable love. Let me not seem ungrateful, for I am not. Most strangely there has mingled in this great flood of life-giving tenderness the sense also of the affection of poor Mrs. Davies. I call her _poor_, because there is, I know not why, something oddly pathetic in her sudden devotion to me. When I met her wild eyes grown quite tender and heard her crooning exclamations in her unintelligible language, I had, even in the midst of my own weakness, the sort of half pitying gratitude which we feel for the love of an animal, of something strong and naturally savage, grown very gentle towards one. _July_ 5, 1773. Is that hideous thing true? Did it ever happen? Or is some shred of nightmare returning ever and again out of the black depths of my sickness? It comes and goes, and every time new doubts--hope it may be a dream, fear it may be reality--come with it. It was three days after the shipwreck; the weather had calmed, and for the first time I ventured abroad into the park. That much and a little more is real, and bears in my mind the indescribable quality of certainty. I had wandered down the glen and through the churchyard, and I remember pausing before the great stone cross, covered with curious basket work patterns, and wondering whether when it was made--a thousand years ago--women about to be mothers had felt as great perplexity and loneliness as I, and at the same time, as great joy. I crossed the piece of boggy meadow, vivid green in the fitful sunshine, and climbed upon the sea-wall and sat down. I was tired; and the solitude, the sunshine, the faint silken rustle of the sea on the reefs, the salt smell--all filled me with a languid happiness quite unspeakable. All this I know, I am certain of, as the scratching of my pen; in fact, those moments on the sea-wall are, in a manner, the latest thing of which I have vivid certainty; all that came later--my illness, the news of my miscarriage, my recovery, and even this present moment, seeming comparatively unreal. I do not know how long I may have sat there. I was listening to the sea, to the wind in my hair, and watching the foam running in little feathery balls along the sand, when I heard voices, and saw three men wading among the rocks a little way off, as if in search of something. My eyes followed them lazily, and then I saw close under me, what I had taken at first for a heap of seaweed and sea refuse cast upon the sand, but which, as my eyes fixed it, became--or methought it became--something hideous and terrible; so that for very horror I could not shriek. And