ay of the bed-clothes. Now and
again, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between the
beds, and one hears the noise of a metal pail. At the end of the room,
in the dark jumble of those blind men who look straight before them and
the mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness.
She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless.
She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, prevents them from
going out.

I turn my head on the pillow. In the bed bracketed with mine on the
other side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp,
there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color. From
time to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards the
ceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together his
spittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion. I am so near to
him that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, and
the odor of his inward wound.

* * * * * *

I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have the
veil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly by
everything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek
the source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing
with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the
earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has
almost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of
frothy polish.

The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with an
effort, I said aloud:

"Why don't they wash his hands?"

My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear
me, and shakes his head.

My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to
watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen
man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By night
he was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with
yellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles
sighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan his
ochreous face.

His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where his
wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy
lungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in the
settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantly
exa