With a view to my comfort and quiet, they put him into the cab of Le Baron; and, having undertaken to send Dupuytrien to me immediately on my reaching Paris, took their leave, and Trevanion and I set out homeward. Not all my exhaustion and debility--nor even the acute pain I was suffering, could prevent my laughing at O'Leary's adventure; and it required all Trevanion's prudence to prevent my indulging too far in my recollection of it. When we reached Meurice's, I found Dupuytrien in waiting, who immediately pronounced the main artery of the limb as wounded; and almost as instantaneously proceeded to pass a ligature round it. This painful business being concluded, I was placed upon a sofa, and being plentifully supplied with lemonade, and enjoined to keep quiet, left to my own meditations, such as they were, till evening--Trevanion having taken upon him to apologize for our absence at Mrs. Bingham's dejeune, and O'Leary being fast asleep in his own apartments. CHAPTER XXXV. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS--A FIRST LOVE. I know of no sensations so very nearly alike, as those felt on awaking after very sudden and profuse loss of blood, and those resulting from a large dose of opium. The dizziness, the confusion, and the abstraction at first, gradually yielding, as the senses became clearer, to a vague and indistinct consciousness; then the strange mistiness, in which fact and fiction are wrapped up--the confounding of persons, and places, and times, not so as to embarrass and annoy--for the very debility you feel subdues all irritation--but rather to present a panoramic picture of odd and incongruous events more pleasing than otherwise. Of the circumstances by which I was thus brought to a sick couch, I had not even the most vague recollection--the faces and the dress of all those I had lately seen were vividly before me; but how, and for what purpose I knew not. Something in their kindness and attention had left an agreeable impression upon my mind, and without being able, or even attempting to trace it, I felt happy in the thought. While thus the "hour before" was dim and indistinct, the events of years past were vividly and brightly pictured before me; and strange, too, the more remote the period, the more did it seem palpable and present to my imagination. For so it is, there is in memory a species of mental long-sightedness, which, though blind to the object close beside you, can reach the blue mountains and the starry skies, which lie full many a league away. Is this a malady? or is it rather a providential gift to alleviate the tedious hours of the sick bed, and cheer the lonely sufferer, whose thoughts are his only realm?