King for sending to rescue the Princess Clementina a marrowless thing
that could not die like a man. Wogan stirred in his sleep and waked up.
The rain had ceased, and a light wind blew across the country. Outside
the sign-board creaked and groaned upon its stanchion. Once he became
aware of that sound he could no longer sleep for listening to it; and at
last he sprang out of bed, and leaning out of the window lifted the
sign-board off the stanchion and into his bedroom.

It was a plain white board without any device on it. "True," thought
Wogan, "the man wants a new name for his inn." He propped the board
against the left side of his bed, since that was nearest to the window,
got between the sheets, and began to think over names. He turned on his
right side and fell asleep again.

He was not to sleep restfully that night. He waked again, but very
slowly, and without any movement of his body. He lay with his face
towards the door, dreamily considering that the landlord, for all his
pride in his new paint, had employed a bad workman who had left a black
strip of the door unpainted,--a fairly wide strip, too, which his host
should never have overlooked.

Wogan was lazily determining to speak to the landlord about it when his
half-awakened mind was diverted by a curious phenomenon, a delusion of
the eyes such as he had known to have befallen him before when he had
stared for a long while on any particular object: the strip of black
widened and widened. Wogan waited for it to contract, as it would be
sure to do. But it did not contract, and--so Wogan waked up completely.

He waked up with a shock of the heart, with all his senses startled and
strained. But he had been gradually waking before, and so by neither