Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/182

154 able to distinguish day from night; to see neither the sky, nor the sun, nor your parents, nor anything of what is around you, and which you touch; to be sunk in endless darkness, as though buried in the bowels of the earth! Make a little effort to close your eyes, and to think of being obliged to remain forever thus; you will suddenly be overwhelmed by a mental agony, by terror; it will seem to you impossible to resist, that you must burst into a scream, that you must go mad or die.

“But, poor boys! when you enter the Institute for the Blind for the first time, during their recreation hour, and hear them playing on violins and flutes, and talking loudly and laughing, running up and down the stairs at a rapid pace, and wandering freely through the halls and dormitories, you would never think them to be the unfortunates that they are. One must observe them closely. There are lads of sixteen or eighteen, robust and cheerful, who bear their blindness with a certain ease, almost with hardihood; but you understand from a certain proud, resentful expression of countenance that they must have suffered tremendously before they became resigned to this misfortune.

“There are others, with sweet and pallid faces on which a profound resignation is visible; but they are sad, and one understands that they must still weep at times in secret. Ah, my sons! reflect that some of them have lost their sight in a few days; some after years of martyrdom and after terrible surgical operations; and that many were born so,—born into a night that has no dawn for them,—that they entered