ors did it. A razor might have done
it, for all I cared. It gave me joy as a boy to think how it would feel
to be only head and decorate a table. Brains certainly counted with
them--they were always on top. And if they trained their tongues to run
out and wash their faces and comb their hair, a valet would not be
necessary. I've seen a man with no legs find a way to jump on a
Broadway car and a man without arms can't be kept from playing the piano
with his toes. This is because human nature has such a persistent way of
trying to do the difficult thing, usually with wonderful success. Man
can't fly nor be a fish naturally, but he wants to know how it would
feel, and so he makes some startling flights and dives at doing both.

Well, I never tried falling out of a five-story window before just to
see how it felt, but I got the sensation by doing it without trying. My
first knowledge after the act was the sensation of carbolic acid making
an appeal to my best-educated sense. That is all I knew for a long, long
time--probably a year or two; then I began to have larger ideas, but not
very broad or deep. I began to feel that I was just a head, and from
this I figured it was all over with me on earth, and I was starting in
to be a young angel. At first, I was to be only a small angel, just a
cherub, with nothing but a fat head and two little wings about as big as
your hand spreading out from under each ear. I tried to bend an ear down
or cast an eye to feel or see if the wings had started, for as I thought
of my condition I imagined a couple of inflamed lumps were swelling
where the wingroots ought to be. But the ears were stiff and the eyes
would not reach around so far.

The wing-boils made me feel a little colicky; I don't know why, for
there was no substantial excuse for a case of colic, as I was all gone
below the collar. Winging, I concluded, was like teething. Infant angels
naturally felt colicky for some time before they cut their ear-wings.
By-and-by, the little wings would, no doubt, drop out, and the second
wings would come in at the shoulder-blades, when I sprouted out below
and took on shoulders with blades.

I slept, and slept, and the wings began to unfold and feather up nicely,
but they were too sore to flap yet and the feathers were mostly pin size
and very fluffy. Only at the top there were just a few that you might
say had real quills on as yet. The carbolic acid kept getting stronger.
I fancied it must be