have to lie still and watch myself getting big brown and yellow spots
all over me, like a map that has taken to growing.

The man on my right has consumption--smells of cod-liver oil, and coughs
all night. The man on my left is a down-easter with a liver which has
struck work; looks like a human pumpkin; and how he contrives to whittle
jackstraws all day, and eat as he does, I can't understand. I have tried
reading and tried whittling, but they don't either of them satisfy me,
so that yesterday I concluded to ask the doctor if he couldn't suggest
some other amusement.

I waited until he had gone through the ward, and then seized my chance,
and asked him to stop a moment.

"Well, my man," said he, "what do you want!"

I thought him rather disrespectful, but I replied, "Something to do,
doctor."

He thought a little, and then said: "I'll tell you what to do. I think
if you were to write out a plain account of your life it would be pretty
well worth reading. If half of what you told me last week be true, you
must be about as clever a scamp as there is to be met with. I suppose
you would just as lief put it on paper as talk it."

"Pretty nearly," said I. "I think I will try it, doctor."

After he left I lay awhile thinking over the matter. I knew well that I
was what the world calls a scamp, and I knew also that I had got little
good out of the fact. If a man is what people call virtuous, and fails