Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LE TRAVAIL D'AVEUGLE" The " leading and controlling event" of Pres- cott's life was justly said by Hillard to be the accident which deprived him of sight in one eye, and which was soon followed by such an impairment of the vision of the other as to make his popular title, " the blind historian," no wide misnomer. It was a student prank that destroyed his left eye. Leaving the table at commons one day in his Junior year, Prescott turned sharply to see what particular piece of skylarking the noise behind him indicated, and was-caught full in the open eye by a crust of bread thrown after him with none but rollicking intent. The blow was a fearful one in its nervous effects, striking Prescott down as by a rifle bullet. No external mark, then or later, was left on the eye, but it was made instantly and incurably sightless. The oculists of the day called ita paralysis of the retina. The patient soon recovered tone and spirits, and went back to enter into the kingdom of the learned with one eye, and did it gayly and triumphantly, as has been seen. Immediately after graduation, he began reading law in his father's office, and looked forward confidently to a career at the bar. But early in 1815 the shadow deepened upon him. He was seized with an obscure inflammation in the right eye. Its diagnosis long baffled the physicians, who only later determined it to be a case of acute rheumatism. For months he was entirely blind, and never again was he able to use the eye except with extreme caution, and for but short periods at a time. Intervals of complete blindness fell upon him with the frequent recurrence of his disease, — which often attacked him painfully in other parts of the body also, — and the fear of losing even the feeble and precarious sight remaining to him never l...