p through the roof and
alights on the bank of a stream at the feet of his lady love, who is
making daisy chains.

Nevertheless, when I was safely home again, with Mrs. Klopton brewing
strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy, and that
smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and closing it, and
then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity and the madness of
the whole thing. And while I laughed my very soul was sick, for the
girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all the loyalty that answers
between men for honor that I would have to put her out of my mind.

And yet, all the night that followed, filled as it was with the
shrieking demons of pain, I saw her as I had seen her last, in the queer
hat with green ribbons. I told the doctor this, guardedly, the next
morning, and he said it was the morphia, and that I was lucky not to
have seen a row of devils with green tails.

I don't know anything about the wreck of September ninth last. You who
swallowed the details with your coffee and digested the horrors with
your chop, probably know a great deal more than I do. I remember very
distinctly that the jumping and throbbing in my arm brought me back to a
world that at first was nothing but sky, a heap of clouds that I thought
hazily were the meringue on a blue charlotte russe. As the sense of
hearing was slowly added to vision, I heard a woman near me sobbing that
she had lost her hat pin, and she couldn't keep her hat on.

I think I dropped back into unconsciousness again, for the next thing
I remember was of my blue patch of sky clouded with smoke, of a strange
roaring and crackling, of a rain of fiery sparks on my face and of
somebody beating at me with feeble hands. I opened my eyes and
closed them again: the girl in blue was bending over me. With that
imperviousness to big things and keenness to small that is the first
effect of shock, I tried to be facetious, when a spark stung my cheek.

"You will have to rouse yourself!" the girl was repeating desperately.
"You've been on fire twice already." A piece of striped ticking floated
slowly over my head. As the wind caught it its charring edges leaped
into flame.

"Looks like a kite, doesn't it?" I remarked cheerfully. And then, as my
arm gave an excruciating throb--"Jove, how my arm hurts!"

The girl bent over and spoke slowly, distinctly, as one might speak to a
deaf person or a child.

"Listen, Mr. Blakeley," she said earn