d and bedclothes drenched, he lay weak,
limp, and feeling like a squeezed sponge, but with a temperature that
shows three degrees marked down towards his own line. Should there be
a nurse available the patient is washed down and put into fresh
clothes and pyjamas; if not, as was most usually the case, he lies in
his sweat, his skin chilling in patches for a while, and feeling
sticky and uncomfortable all over, but too limp to move. The drug has
a strange and wonderfully clearing effect on the brain. He feels as if
all his previous life had been passed in some land of twilight. Now he
lives in a land of glorious light--light that pervades everything. His
eyelids are closed to shut in the glorious light. He seems to have
been sitting in some dark theatre when the lights have been turned on
on a glorious transformation scene. He has circled the world and seen
its loveliest places, but only now sees how beautiful they were. In
Samoa, and the Pali at Honolulu, he sees the individual leaves
shimmering in the clear air, and then on his quickened consciousness
falls a great sense of the beauty of the world. Separate from the
beauty of the world seems the life on it, and now for the first time
his lips are pressed to her bluest veins. "I want to take your
temperature, please," as he feels the little glass tube at the dry
skin of his lips. "105.2," he hears whispered when it is withdrawn.
They think he cannot hear as he lies motionless with eyes closed. All
the three degrees have been lost, and more--it is a score for Disease.
Another dose of phenacetin--surely all that glorious, untravelled,
half-tasted world is too beautiful and rich with promise to leave, too
full of music he has not heard, too full of pictures he has not seen,
too full of unplucked laurels, of lips unkissed, of sunsets which have
not yet painted the clouds in their setting--above all, along the
passed path of his life are neglected flowers of love lying which he
has walked on with scarce a smile of thanks for the throwers, whose
hands, perchance now withering, he longs to kiss.

Temporarily the thermometer score is favourable to him again, but all
he can do is to lie very still, knowing that every feather-pressure of
strength will be wanted. Lying sideways, as he has been shifted round
by his nurse on the pillow, he hears the pump, pump of his heart. He
never noted that pumping before as he does now--quick and strenuous
it is, but still strong, without the sp