shavings in the grate
when they made a fire in the evenings, to listen to the voices of the
women by the bed, to know that the pleasantest belonged to the one with
the low, shapeless figure, and to call her Lois, when he wanted a
drink, long before he knew himself.

They were very long, pleasant days in early December. The sunshine was
pale, but it suited his hurt eyes better: it crept slowly in the
mornings over the snuff-coloured carpet on the floor, up the brown
foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind shook the window-curtains,
made little crimson pools of mottled light over the ceiling,--curdling
pools, that he liked to watch: going off, from the clean gray walls,
and rustling curtain, and transparent crimson, into sleeps that lasted
all day.

He was not conscious how he knew he was in a hospital: but he did know
it, vaguely; thought sometimes of the long halls outside of the door,
with ranges of rooms opening into them, like this, and of very barns of
rooms on the other side of the building with rows of white cots where
the poorer patients lay: a stretch of travel from which his brain came
back to his snug fireplace, quite tired, and to Lois sitting knitting
by it. He called the little Welsh-woman, "Sister," too, who used to
come in a stuff dress, and white bands about her face, to give his
medicine, and gossip with Lois in the evening: she had a comical voice,
like a cricket chirping. There was another with a real Scotch brogue,
who came and listened sometimes, bringing a basket of undarned
stockings: the doctor told him one day how fearless and skilful she
was, every summer going to New Orleans when the yellow fever came. She
died there the next June: but Holmes never, somehow, could realize a
martyr in the cheery, freckled-faced woman whom he always remembered
darning stockings in the quiet fire-light. It was very quiet; the
voices about him were pleasant and low. If he had drifted from any
shock of pain into a sleep like death, some of the stillness hung about
him yet; but the outer life was homely and fresh and natural.

The doctor used to talk to him a little; and sometimes one or two of
the patients from the eye-ward would grow tired of sitting about in the
garden-alleys, and would loiter in, if Lois would give them leave; but
their talk wearied him, jarred him as strangely as if one had begun on
politics and price-currents to the silent souls in Hades. It was
enough thought for him to listen to t