hands--

"I can't sleep," he said.

But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed out,
to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things on
with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button at the
side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said; and after
some squabbling he agreed to that. (Afterwards it was quite delightful
to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which the good lady took
all these amazing inversions.) He could have a library ladder in his
room, and all his meals could be laid on the top of his bookcase. We
also hit on an ingenious device by which he could get to the floor
whenever he wanted, which was simply to put the British Encyclopaedia
(tenth edition) on the top of his open shelves. He just pulled out a
couple of volumes and held on, and down he came. And we agreed there
must be iron staples along the skirting, so that he could cling to those
whenever he wanted to get about the room on the lower level.

As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested. It
was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her, and it was
I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent two whole days
at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man with a screw-driver,
and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations for him--ran a wire to
bring his bells within reach, turned all his electric lights up
instead of down, and so on. The whole affair was extremely curious and
interesting to me, and it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some
great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round
the lintels of his doors from one room to another, and never, never,
never coming to the club any more....

Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was sitting
by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his favourite corner
by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the ceiling, when the
idea struck me. "By Jove, Pyecraft!" I said, "all this is totally
unnecessary."

And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion I
blurted it out. "Lead underclothing," said I, and the mischief was done.

Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. "To be right ways up
again--" he said. I gave him the whole secret before I saw where it
would take me. "Buy sheet lead," I said, "stamp it into discs. Sew 'em
all over your underclothes until you have enough. Have lead-soled bo