A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



judge, a part of the change which the Doctor 

 called &quot; renewing one s infancy,&quot; and which was 

 attributable to my life for several months in the 

 wilderness. I shall therefore be pardoned, I hope, 

 for telling of my slipping into a condition of 

 amorous sentimentality when I insist that it was 

 altogether the result of a cleared vision. Unques 

 tionably, I saw some things which I had never 

 seen before, or if I had seen them, they were so 

 indistinct that I gave no heed to them, and this 

 consciousness of a rectified vision needs some 

 explanation. 



When I was a lad I had a grandmother, one of 

 those dear, lovable old women of another epoch, 

 who managed to make some deep impressions upon 

 ductile minds, that were never outgrown, and 

 which were very often impressions that should not 

 have been made. One of her favourite phrases 

 directed to me when my boy s heedlessness became 

 very obvious was, &quot; Ah, my boy, the scales will 

 fall from your eyes some day.&quot; I was accustomed 

 to hear that admonitory speech from the nursery 

 to the school days. It was always said with a 

 tender finality that barred all further speech. It 

 bothered me a good deal, as I began to think. 

 The only scales that my limited experience had 

 made me acquainted with were fish-scales, and I 

 could not, do my best, adjust the metaphor, if it 

 was one, to the physical facts. I often wondered 

 in my crib if men had invisible fish-scales growing 

 over their eyes, which at some crisis dropped off. 

 Then, as I grew older, and read the phrase in the 



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