CHAPTER XLVI.
IN WHICH SAM MEETS WITH A SERIOUS ACCIDENT, AND GETS CRIPPLED FOR LIFE.
What morning is this, when Sam, waking from silver dreams to a golden reality, turns over in his bed and looks out of the open glass door; at dog Rover, propped up against the lintel, chopping at the early flies; at the flower-garden, dark and dewy; at the black wall of forest beyond, in which the magpies were beginning to pipe cheerily; at the blessed dawn which was behind and above it, shooting long rays of primrose and crimson half-way up the zenith; hearing the sleepy ceaseless crawling of the river over the shingle bars; hearing the booming of the cattle-herds far over the plain; hearing the chirrup of the grasshopper among the raspberries, the chirr of the cicada among the wattles--what happy morning is this?
Is it the Sabbath?
Ah, no! the Sabbath was yesterday.

This is his wedding morn.
My dear brother bachelor, do you remember those old first-love sensations, or have you got too old, and too fat?
Do you remember the night when you parted from her on the bridge by the lock, the night before her father wrote to you and forbade you the house?
Have you got the rose she gave you there?
Is it in your Bible, brother?
Do you remember the months that followed--months of mad grief and wild yearning, till the yearning grew less--less wild--and the grief less desperate; and then, worst of all, the degrading consciousness that you were, in spite of yourself, getting rid of your love, and that she was not to you as she had been?
Do you remember all this?
When you come across the rose in your Bible, do you feel that you would give all the honour and wealth of the world to feel again those happy, wretched, old sensations?
Do you not say that this world has nothing to give in comparison to that?
Not this world, I believe.

You and I can never feel that again.

So let us make up our minds to it--it is dead.

In God's name don't let us try to galvanize an old corpse, which may rise upon us hideous, and scare us to the lower pit.