The rest of my story you know almost as well as I do myself. You see my life from day to day. You can picture to yourself my sorrow and my unhappy position. You can see how little _she_ has changed.
And yet we can never be more to one another than we are now. Never. Never! We are married, and yet we are not. We are separated, alas, here on earth, but we _must_ be united in heaven. Think of the years that have passed, and think how happy we might have been, and what a thread there was between our present existence and the life we long to lead. God's will be done!
Poor Pierre here let his head fall into his hands, and wept in silence.
It was not the kind of grief that needed consolation, and so I let him weep on.
All at once a breeze sprung up and filled the sails. Pierre immediately roused himself, but soon relapsed into his accustomed calm quiet manner.
Both the other sailors now came on deck, the nets were thrown over, and the business of the night began.
Three years afterward, by the merest accident in the world, I happened to return to my favorite little village. There was evidently some excitement going on, and as I chanced to recognize my old friend Father Hermann, I went up and renewed our acquaintance.
"What is the matter?" said he; "why you do not mean to say you don't know?"
"Why your old friend Alphonsine has been dead six months."
"I really don't see why the worthy inhabitants of the village should rejoice at that," said I.
"A great obstacle has been removed," said the father; "don't you remember?"
"The marriage of Pierre Prévost and Marie!"
I was not long in accompanying Father Hermann to the cottage in which my old friends were receiving the warm congratulations of their friends and neighbors.
They recognized me at once, and insisted that I should be present at the entertainment which was to follow in the course of the day. Of course I accepted the invitation. I never remember having enjoyed myself so much, and am quite certain that I spoke from my heart when I proposed, in my very best French, the healths of la belle Marie and Pierre Prévost.
INSIDE THE EYE: THE OPHTHALMOSCOPE AND ITS' USES.
There are few spectacles more affecting--and there were few more hopelessly distressing--than that which many have seen, of the blind man, with eyes unaltered in their human aspect of beauty, searching vainly to penetrate the unchangeable darkness of a noonday, bright to others, and replete with the splendor of light and color. There have always been many of these sufferers from a disease which claims the most profound sympathy, and which seemed bitterly to reproach our science that it could not timely penetrate the mystery of that obscure chamber which lies behind the iris, and had found no means for enabling us to see through the clear but darkened space of the pupil. That reproach, at least, exists in part no longer. Since some few years now we have learnt how to explain the obscurity of the interior of the eye, and by what optical contrivances we can overcome this darkness and look into the depths of the ocular globe; thus inspecting with ease, and quite painlessly to the individual, the lenses and humors of the eye, the nerve of sight and its transparent retinal expansion, and even the vascular tissue which lies behind and surrounds this. This is a great triumph of physical science, and it is no barren triumph. The insight which we gain into the host of affections of the refracting media and deep membranes of the eye has given to our diagnosis and therapeutical treatment of the most obscure forms of disease leading to blindness, a certainty and precision to which we were formerly strangers.