ing it easy?

If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell
whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch.
To do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the
light meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest
from his wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.

When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty
daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully, you
must be a natural-born loller to begin with and revert. Bella
Westerveld was and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and
hadn't. So there he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his
heart thump so fast when he was lying so still. If it had been light,
you could have seen the lines of strained resignation in the sagging
muscles of his patient face.

They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every
morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already
reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used to drape the
chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great
wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store
clothes on the chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.

Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the
instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the
bed-room was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by
the feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the
very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing
of the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds
in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in
the ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But
here in the un-sylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of
Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.

A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, no
cattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling. Once,
when they first came to the city, he had risen at twelve-thirty,
thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping about the flat, waking
up everyone and loosing from his wife's lips a stream of acid
vituperation that seared even his case-hardened sensibilities. The
people sleeping in the bedroom of the flat next door must have heard
her.

"You big rube! Getting up in the mid