‘When I again came to myself I was lying in the house of an American missionary³ named Clements. I had been found, at early dawn, stark⁴ naked, in a Cairo street, and picked up for dead. Judging from appearances I must have wandered for miles, all through the night. Whence I had come, or whither I was going, none could tell,—I could not tell myself. For weeks I hovered⁵ between life and death. The kindness of Mr and Mrs Clements was not to be measured by words. I was brought to their house a penniless, helpless, battered⁶ stranger, and they gave me all they had to offer, without money and without price,—with no expectation of an earthly reward. Let no one pretend that there is no Christian⁷ charity under the sun. The debt I owed that man and woman I was never able to repay. Before I was properly myself again, and in a position to offer some adequate testimony⁸ of the gratitude⁹ I felt, Mrs Clements was dead, drowned during an excursion on the Nile, and her husband had departed on a missionary expedition into Central Africa, from which he never returned.

 

‘Although, in a measure, my physical health returned, for months after I had left the roof of my hospitable¹⁰ hosts, I was in a state of semi-imbecility. I suffered from a species of

分享到：