For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called I met old Davidson in the passage. “He can see his thumb!” the old gentleman said, in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat. “He can see his thumb, Bellows¹!” he said, with the tears in his eyes. “The lad will be all right yet.”  
I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his face, and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.
 
“It’s amazing,” said he. “There’s a kind of patch come there.” He pointed² with his finger. “I’m on the rocks as usual, and the penguins³ are staggering and flapping about as usual, and there’s been a whale showing every now and then, but it’s got too dark now to make him out. But put something there, and I see it—I do see it. It’s very dim and broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint spectre of itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing⁴ me. It’s like a hole in this infernal phantom⁵ world. Just put your hand by mine. No—not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff⁶! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling sky. Just by it there’s a group of stars like a cross coming out.”
 
From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew

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