Scenes and incidents, long forgotten, paraded before me in the darkness.
Scenes that I should not have known were connected with myself but for the strange incidents that led up to them in the exact manner in which they had occurred, and explained them with such distinctness, that my mind was forced to grasp and to recognise them instantaneously.
Surely there could be no greater hell to a bad man than his conscience; and if we accept the belief that the soul does not perish, and has the power of thought, we at once create a hell far more terrible than mere bodily suffering.
I remembered a passage of De Quincey's in which he says:—
"I feel assured there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away the veil; but alike whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, when as, in fact, we all know that it is the light that is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall be withdrawn."
