Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 285, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1916 — Convalescence. [ARTICLE]

Convalescence.

The return from Illness to health Is like coming up from a dive, supposing the time from when the swimmer firsf sees light through the water until his head rises to the surface to be the affair of weeks. The change in physical condition may be slow, but the change in orientation takes place in a twinkling and is complete. The eye no longer looks down into unplumbed deeps, but back toward the light of day; curiosity for the ultimate yields to a golden memory of falmiliar things —friends, household goods, books, barking dogs, the freshness of grass and trees. The body has reasserted itself. The dreaming imagination is dragged away from its goal by the galloping senses. Eye, ear, touch, taste start upon a rampage. Especially does the appetite for food wax furious, discovering itself endowed with power to transform a coddled egg into something rich and strange, and to illumine chicken broth with a charm that no art can equal. The universe, lately shrunk to the sickroom, now rises again like the genie out of the bottle in which he had been imprisoned; the sickroom becomes a house of detention, and at its door, as in a seashell clapped to the ear, the convalescent hearkens to all the rumors of the outer world. —Henry Dwight Sedgwick, ill The Atlantic.