to have some taste. And at last he began to
distinguish the people in the beds near by, and to chat with them.

On his right lay a black-haired, yellow-faced dock labourer with a
broken nose. His disease, whatever it might be, was clearly different
from Peer's. He plagued the nurse with foul-mouthed complaints of
the food, swearing he would report about it. On the other side lay an
emaciated cobbler with a soft brown beard like the Christ pictures, and
cheeks glowing with fever. He was dying of cancer. At right angles with
him lay a man with the face and figure of a prophet--a Moses--all bushy
white hair and beard; he was in the last stage of consumption, and his
cough was like a riveting machine. "Huh!" he would groan, "if only I
could get across to Germany there'd be a chance for me yet." Beside him
was a fellow with short beard and piercing eyes, who was a little off
his head, and imagined himself a corporal of the Guards. Often at night
the others would be wakened by his springing upright in bed and calling
out: "Attention!"

One man lay moaning and groaning all the time, turning from side to side
of a body covered with sores. But one day he managed to swallow some of
the alcohol they used as lotion, and after that lay singing and weeping
alternately. And there was a red-bearded man with glasses, a commercial
traveller; he had put a bullet into his head, but the doctors had
managed to get it out again, and now he lay and praised the Lord for his
miraculous deliverance.

It was strange to Peer to lie awake at night in this great room in the
dim light of the night-lamp; it seemed as if beings from the land of the
dead were stirring in those beds round about him. But in the daytime,
when friends and relations of the patients came a-visiting, Peer could
hardly keep from crying. The cobbler had a wife and a little girl who
came and sat beside him, gazing at him as if they could never let him
go. The prophet, too, had a wife, who wept inconsolably--and all the
rest seemed to have some one or other to care for them. But where was
Louise--why did Louise never come?

The man on the right had a sister, who came sweeping in, gorgeous in her
trailing soiled silk dress. Her shoes were down at heel, but her hat was
a wonder, with enormous plumes. "Hallo, Ugly! how goes it?" she said;
and sat down and crossed her legs. Then the pair would talk mysteriously
of people with strange names: "The Flea," "Cockroach," "The Galliot,"
"