with pimples. His mouth was wide and beastly, and filled
with tobacco. His mustache was irregular, and dyed almost to the roots
by tobacco juice. His breath was odoriferous with fumes of whiskey,
cigarettes, and foul stomach disorders, causing a poisonous stench to
pollute the surrounding atmosphere. One could not look upon him without
a feeling of sickening disgust. He was a twentieth century American
civilized Christian. He was not, of course, the highest type of a
civilized Christian, but nevertheless he was of a high enough order for
a Christian community to breed, rear, and put in charge of its sick and
unfortunate members. As he pushed the tub along he carelessly allowed it
to strike the end of my bed, which gave me a shock as though I had been
pierced by a thousand daggers, causing an involuntary groan to escape
from my lips.

"Shut up there, you old duffer," said he, looking at me in a stupid,
expressionless sort of a way, "you are not hurt yet. I'll give you
something to cry about if you don't quit making such a fuss over
nothing. You're the biggest baby I ever saw."

Having fixed the tub in position, put some pieces of ice into the water,
and adjusted a small portable partition around my bed, which obstructed
the view of the other patients, he called for the assistance of another
attendant, and began preparations to put me into the tub. As they
uncovered me, I glanced down at my emaciated form and was astounded at
my own appearance. Nothing now remained of the once muscular and
powerful frame I had always felt so proud of, but sickly looking skin
and bones. Raising my arm to the level of my eyes I discovered that it
was shriveled, and ghastly to behold, and it fell back to my side with a
sickening thud for the want of strength to remain erect. It seemed as if
a great fiery furnace was located within me and that I was fairly
burning alive. Ten thousand different pains were shooting back and forth
in every part of my body, but the most excruciating of all was a
terrible pain in the center of my back, which caused me to think that my
spinal column had been dislocated. And then as if all of the tortures of
a refined civilization had suddenly been thrust upon me, as though some
supernatural hellish agency was instrumental in causing me to go the
full limit of human suffering, those two devilish orderlies took hold of
me, one by the head and the other by the feet, and without any leverage
whatever to break the stra