Can I feel all this, and not bless
the Lord, who so far baffled these designs, and deigned to appoint my
field of labor within the sacred confines of his own vineyard?
The visitation of which I have spoken had a powerful influence on my
after-life; it rendered the preservation of my newly-restored sight an
object of paramount importance, to which the regular routine of
education must needs be sacrificed. A boarding-school had never been
thought of for me. My parents loved their children too well to meditate
their expulsion from the paternal roof; and the children so well loved
their parents and each other that such a separation would have been
insupportable to them. Masters we had in the necessary branches of
education, and we studied together so far as I was permitted to study;
but before it was deemed safe to exercise my eyes with writing
apparatus, I had stealthily possessed myself of a patent copy-book, by
means of which, tracing the characters as they shone through the paper,
I was able to write with tolerable freedom before any one knew that I
could join two letters; and I well remember my father's surprise, not
unmixed with annoyance, when he accidentally took up a letter which I
had been writing to a distant relation, giving a circumstantial account
of some domestic calamity which had no existence but in my brain;
related with so much pathos too, that my tears had fallen over the slate
whereon this my first literary attempt was very neatly traced.
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