iving the
cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side. Each cuff
was a check, and Martin went over them anxiously, in a fever of
expectation, but they were all blanks. He stood there and received the
blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go by for fear it
might be filled out. At last he found it. With trembling fingers he
held it to the light. It was for five dollars. "Ha! Ha!" laughed the
editor across the mangle. "Well, then, I shall kill you," Martin said.
He went out into the wash-room to get the axe, and found Joe starching
manuscripts. He tried to make him desist, then swung the axe for him.
But the weapon remained poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself back
in the ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm. No, it was not snow
that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest not less
than a thousand dollars. He began to collect them and sort them out, in
packages of a hundred, tying each package securely with twine.

He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling flat-
irons, starched shirts, and manuscripts. Now and again he reached out
and added a bundle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared through
the roof and out of sight in a tremendous circle. Martin struck at him,
but he seized the axe and added it to the flying circle. Then he plucked
Martin and added him. Martin went up through the roof, clutching at
manuscripts, so that by the time he came down he had a large armful. But
no sooner down than up again, and a second and a third time and countless
times he flew around the circle. From far off he could hear a childish
treble singing: "Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around."

He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks, starched
shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down, to kill Joe.
But he did not come down. Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having
heard his groans through the thin partition, came into his room, to put
hot flat-irons against his body and damp cloths upon his aching eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI

Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning. It was late
afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed with aching eyes
about the room. Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old,
keeping watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning consciousness.
Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen. She put her work-ca