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.