If he lived long enough to lose his sight he would be cut off from all communion with the outer world, even with his daughter.
"Come close to me, and speak more slowly," he said to her.

"I am growing old and dark.

Yet I am only sixty, and my father lived to be over seventy.

I was over forty when you were born.

It was a sunny day, and I kept away from the house, in the shed, till I saw Mrs.Nixey there beckoning to me.