He was very weak, but the fever was gone, and we had now only to feed him
up, and keep him quiet.
CHAPTER XXII.
JOHN RECALLS AND REMEMBERS.
What a weight was off my heart! It seemed as if nothing more could go
wrong. But, though John was plainly happy, he was not quite comfortable:
he worried himself with trying to remember how he had come to us. The
last thing he could definitely recall before finding himself with us, was
his mother looking at him through a night that seemed made of blackness
so solid that he marvelled she could move in it. She brought him
something to drink, but he fancied it blood, and would not touch it. He
remembered now that there was a red tumbler in his room. He could recall
nothing after, except a cold wind, and a sense of utter weariness but
absolute compulsion: he must keep on and on till he found the gate of
heaven, to which he seemed only for ever coming nearer. His conclusion
was, that he knew what he was about every individual moment, but had no
memory; each thing he did was immediately forgotten, while the knowledge
of what he had to do next remained with him. It was, he thought, a mental
condition analogous with walking, in which every step is a frustrated
fall. I set this down here, because, when I told my uncle what John had
been saying, myself not sure that I perceived what he meant, he declared
the boy a philosopher of the finest grain.
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