ur of stimulants. Pump on, old
heart, he thought-speaks, and on it pumps through the long hours of
watching and waiting; and he watches as a captain might watch the
pumping of his water-logged ship. He is lucky to have a heart that
works like that. The man beside him was being given brandy every three
hours to help the action of his heart. Another thing he was lucky in
was in being free from headache. A sufferer farther down from time to
time called aloud in agony from the terrible splitting pains in his
head, while his was clear to a supersensitive degree--too clear and
active to allow of sleep--and soon came the time when he longed with a
great yearning for the sleep that would not come. It seemed cruel and
unfair that any beggar, any coolie in the fields, any convict could
have this sleep that was denied him. How he tried to fix his mind on
quiet scenes with the sound of falling water, or the sound of falling
breakers fringing the rocks of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn!
But sleep would not come; the panorama of the world spun from scene to
scene all the faster as he tossed limply and wearily. _Custos, quid de
nocte?_ How slowly passes the night, and night sleepless merges into
sleepless day, and for a week the struggle hangs on the winning line
of Disease. Each time the thermometer is drawn from his mouth an ever
new-born hope which has risen dies with the whispered score, but still
the heart pumps strenuously, telling of life and hope the while. On
the morning of the sixth day the score is down a degree. Too good to
believe in until confirmed by the midday record, and then very, very
slowly, by fractions of degrees, it shows less than the record of the
previous days. In the cool quietude of some Continental sculpture
gallery--he cannot tell where--he has seen a statue of Icarus--Icarus
just feeling the earth-spurning power of his new-given wings; Icarus
on tip-toe, with head up and godly-moulded chest and dilated nostrils,
drinking in the clear air, and extended arms towards his new
possession of the clouds. The glorious embodiment of god-like life,
earth-spurning, heavens-enjoying--and as such he feels--he forgets
that his frame is a skin-covered skeleton, that his legs would not
bear him upright. He knows only that the spirit of life has been
breathed into him again, and that it is very good to be alive. The
feeling of being "half in love with easeful death" has passed. The
orchestra of life will play for hi