raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently
with a sad, thin soup. Worst of all, four times in the dreadful
interim between breakfast and supper the postman's thrilly footsteps
soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering
high-note, only to flat off discordantly at Stanton's door without
even so much as a one-cent advertisement issuing from the
letter-slide.--And there would be thirty or forty more days just like
this the doctor had assured him; and Cornelia had said that--perhaps,
if she felt like it--she would write--six--times.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and
smutted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the
window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside
world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except
that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to
rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose
all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty
blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high
night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst
like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of
raw fish. Then, just as the mawkish cold, gray dawn came nosing over
the house-tops, and the poor fellow's mind had reached the point where
the slam of a window or the ripping creak of a floorboard would have
shattered his brittle nerves into a thousand cursing tortures--then
that teasing, tantalizing little friend of all rheumatic invalids--the
Morning Nap--came swooping down upon him like a sponge and wiped out
of his face every single bit of the sharp, precious evidence of pain
which he had been accumulating so laboriously all night long to
present to the Doctor as an incontestable argument in favor of an
opiate.