ine-shop."

"Still hate it?"

Bibbs nodded again.

"Don't blame you!" the doctor grunted. "Yes, I expect it'll make a lump
in your gizzard again. Well, what do you say? Shall I tell him you've
got the old lump there yet? You still want to write, do you?"

"What's the use?" Bibbs said, smiling ruefully. "My kind of writing!"

"Yes," the doctor agreed. "I suppose it you broke away and lived on
roots and berries until you began to 'attract the favorable attention of
editors' you might be able to hope for an income of four or five hundred
dollars a year by the time you're fifty."

"That's about it," Bibbs murmured.

"Of course I know what you want to do," said Gurney, drowsily. "You
don't hate the machine-shop only; you hate the whole show--the noise and
jar and dirt, the scramble--the whole bloomin' craze to 'get on.' You'd
like to go somewhere in Algiers, or to Taormina, perhaps, and bask on a
balcony, smelling flowers and writing sonnets. You'd grow fat on it and
have a delicate little life all to yourself. Well, what do you say? I
can lie like sixty, Bibbs! Shall I tell your father he'll lose another
of his boys if you don't go to Sicily?"

"I don't want to go to Sicily," said Bibbs. "I want to stay right here."

The doctor's drowsiness disappeared for a moment, and he gave his
patient a sharp glance. "It's a risk," he said. "I think we'll find
you're so much better he'll send you back to the shop pretty quick.
Something's got hold of you lately; you're not quite so lackadaisical as
you used to be. But I warn you: I think the shop will knock you just as
it did before, and perhaps even harder, Bibbs."

He rose, shook himself, and rubbed his eyelids. "Well, when we go over
you this afternoon what are we going to say about it?"

"Tell him I'm ready," said Bibbs, looking at the floor.

"Oh no," Gurney laughed. "Not quite yet; but you may be almost. We'll
see. Don't forget I said to walk down."

And when the examination was concluded, that afternoon, the doctor
informed Bibbs that the result was much too satisfactory to be pleasing.
"Here's a new 'situation' for a one-act farce," he said, gloomily, to
his next patient when Bibbs had gone. "Doctor tells a man he's well, and
that's his death sentence, likely. Dam' funny world!"

Bibbs decided to walk home, though Gurney had not instructed him upon
this point. In fact, Gurney seemed to have no more instructions on any
point, so discouraging was the young man's i