Martinsburg Gazette And Public Advertiser

Extraordinary recovery of Sight.—About sixteen years ago, Thomas Wilson, feuar in Langholm, near Dumfries, who is now a man of three score and twelve, felt a dimness of vision creeping over him, and in a short period became, as it is called, stone-blind. To a person who had always led an active life, the affliction was heavy—the privation most severe; but still he was wonderfully cheerful and resigned, and though he seldom removed far from the fire-side, his general health had suffered but little, when the sense of seeing was restored in a manner which is truly wonderful, if not miraculous. On Thursday, the 29th ult. he was seized with a violent pain in his head and temples, accompanied by a copious discharge from his eyes; but at the end of two days the pain and running both ceased, and then the film was gradually removed that had so long shut out the external world. While seated in his dwelling, on Saturday, the 31st of November, he to his utter astonishment, perceived the cheerful light of day, and in a few moments distinctly observed "a tall dark man" passing the window. This individual was his own son, who during the long and dreary blank in his father's existence, had been transformed from "a white headed gallant" to a brawny and "black-a-vieed man." The feelings of the parties were pleasurable in the extreme. The father knew his son by his voice, and perused and re-perused his features with an anxiety which beggars all description. His wife next engaged his attention, and then every member of the family, from a daughter-in-law, whose appearance he had fancied rather than known, to her healthy offspring that ran rambling about, fit emblems of their father when he had seen him before.

For some days the old man was actually half delirious with joy, and even yet his wife complains that it is totally impossible to keep him in the house. His great delight is to wander about the streets and lanes of Langholm, reading the signs and treading his way without the aid of either spectacles or a guide. At other times he explores the fairy nooks of the Ewes and the Esk, laying his palms and eyelids in streams which he never expected to behold again, and whose murmurs are as the sweetest melody of his ear. The lapse of sixteen years produces "divers strange mutations," even in a quiet country village, and many early friends and neighbors have gone down to the grave since Thomas Wilson became unable to distinguish day from night, or even one season from another, excepting as they were intimated to him by different degrees of heat and cold. Still he meets with a few old acquaintances and with these he takes every opportunity of comparing notes and talking over "the days of lang syne." But amidst all his enjoyments, a feeling of melancholy occasionally steals over him, and he finds it difficult to subdue the conviction that his latter end is near at hand, seeing that Providence has worked out for him so mere merciful a deliverance.

Dumfries Cour.