No, John, there is nothing to be done but to wait, and put our trust in Providence and in time." This was a sermon which Gilbert Fenton had occasion to preach very often in the slow weary days that followed John Saltram's recovery of his right senses.

The sick man, tossing to and fro upon the bed he loathed with such an utter loathing, could not refrain from piteous bewailings of his helplessness.

He was not a good subject for sickness, had never served his apprenticeship to a sick-bed until now, and the ordeal seemed to him a very long one.

In all that period of his delirious wanderings there had been an exaggerated sense of time in his mind.

It seemed to him that he had been lying there for years, lost in a labyrinth of demented fancies.
Looking back at that time, now that his reason had been restored to him, he was able to recall his delusions one by one, and it was very difficult for him to understand, even now, that they were all utterly groundless, the mere vagabondage of a wandering brain; that the people he had fancied close at hand, lurking in the next room--he had rarely seen them close about his bed, but had been possessed with a vivid sense of their neighbourhood--had been never near him; that the old friends and associates of his boyhood, who had been amongst these fancied visitors, were for the greater number dead and passed away long before this time; that he had been, in every dream and every fancy of that weary interval, the abject slave of his own hallucinations.