up and down. The weeping old man with the
cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the
writer had for the raising of his bed was for-
gotten and later the carpenter did it in his own
way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to
help himself with a chair when he went to bed at
night.

In his bed the writer rolled over on his side
and lay quite still. For years he had been beset
with notions concerning his heart. He was a
hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea
had got into his mind that he would some time die
unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he
thought of that. It did not alarm him. The
effect in fact was quite a special thing and not
easily explained. It made him more alive, there
in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he
lay and his body was old and not of much use
any more, but something inside him was altogether
young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that
the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth.
No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman, young, and
wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is ab-
surd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old
writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to
the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is
what the writer, or the young thing within the
writer, was thinking about.

The old writer, like all of the people in the

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