at'll be
a lot better for you, don't you? Now let's just sober down and be a good
boy and get some nice sound sleep."

She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center
table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored
faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of
overpowering weariness into irony.

"Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!"

However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even
dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and
having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he
believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was
conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully
in the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp
cover of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few
hours after midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to
lie altogether still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with
digestions of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings
of the morrow. "Owl" cars, bringing in last passengers over distant
trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic
stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the
plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines chugged
and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be
a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to
vibration of machinery underground.

In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as
these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during
an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his
citizenship in a "live town"; but at fifty-five he merely hated them
because they kept him awake. They "pressed on his nerves," as he put it;
and so did almost everything else, for that matter.

He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows
and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the "back
porch," while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next
customer and waited there. "He's gone into Pollocks'," Adams thought,
following this progress. "I hope it'll sour on 'em before breakfast.
Delivered the Andersons'. Now he's getting out ours. Listen to the darn
brute! What's HE care who wants to sleep!" His complaint was of the
horse, who casually shifted weight with a c