rty more days just like
this the doctor had assured him; and Cornelia had said that--perhaps,
if she felt like it--she would write--six--times.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and
smutted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the
window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside
world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except
that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to
rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose
all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty
blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high
night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst
like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of
raw fish. Then, just as the mawkish cold, gray dawn came nosing over
the house-tops, and the poor fellow's mind had reached the point where
the slam of a window or the ripping creak of a floorboard would have
shattered his brittle nerves into a thousand cursing tortures--then
that teasing, tantalizing little friend of all rheumatic invalids--the
Morning Nap--came swooping down upon him like a sponge and wiped out
of his face every single bit of the sharp, precious evidence of pain
which he had been accumulating so laboriously all night long to
present to the Doctor as an incontestable argument in favor of an
opiate.

Whiter than his rumpled bed, but freshened and brightened and
deceptively free from pain, he woke at last to find the pleasant
yellow sunshine mottling his dingy carpet like a tortoise-shell cat.
Instinctively with his first yawny return to consciousness he reached
back under his pillow for Cornelia's letter.

Out of the stiff envelope fluttered instead the tiny circular to which
Cornelia had referred so scathingly.

It was a dainty bit of gray Japanese tissue with the crimson-inked
text glowing gaily across it. Something in the whole color scheme and
the riotously quirky typography suggested at once the audaciously
original work of some young art student who was fairly splashing her
way along the road to financial independence, if not to fame. And this
is what the little circular said, flushing redder and redder and
redder with each ingenuous statement:

THE SERIAL-LETTER COMPANY.

Comfort and entertainment Furnished for Invalids, Travelers,
and all Lonely People.

Real Letter