But imagine a bashful youth,
awkward and near-sighted, whose friends dissuade him from wearing
glasses. Is there in the universe an individual more unlucky, more
blundering, more sincerely to be pitied?
See that little boy, who, having put on his father's spectacles, is
enjoying for the first time a clear and distinct view of the evening
sky. "Oh! is that pretty little yellow dot a star?" exclaims the
delighted child. Poor innocent! a star had always been to him a dim,
cloudy spot, a little nebula, which the magic glass has now resolved;
and he can hardly believe that this brilliant point is not an optical
illusion. But when his mother assures him that the stars always appear
so to her, and he turns to look in her face, he says, "Why, mother!
how beautiful you look! Please to give me some little spectacles,
_all my own!_" She could not resist this entreaty,--(who could?)--and
little "Squire Specs" does not mind the shouts of his companions or
the high-sounding nicknames they give him, he so rejoices in what
seems to him a new sense, a _second sight_.
I was summoned, the other day, to welcome a family of cousins from a
distant State, whom I had not seen for a very long time. They were
accompanied, I was told, by a Boston lady, a stranger to us.
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