beat up the feathers in his
pillows and bed--for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed
and would have no other kind in the house.

The old clock in the hall--that had sat there since long before he,
himself, could remember--struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to
his disgust, even twelve.

At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.

There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness.
If there is a hell for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for
commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness--the wild staring eyes of an
eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental
anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.

But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy--and
still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his
fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: "And now
I don't care if I never go to sleep!"

He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems,
and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.

His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand
beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the
satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.

He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could
see thoughts--beautiful, grand thoughts--long before they reached
him,--stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward
into his mind.

He walked out and down the long hall.

The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and
cursed it.

Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could
count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to
know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.

It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined
that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and
was pumping the water--as the ram had done for years--through the
house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could
not throw it off.

He walked down the hall, rudely snatched the clock door open, and
stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.

The moonbeams came in at the stained glass windows, and cast red and
yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished
floor.

He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for
it.

Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with th