dle of the night and stomping
around like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the back yard and
sleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."

Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be
appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed
so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept
back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of
the flat just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a
little, grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had
still the power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were
daily shocks to him whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm,
had been a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the
hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of
nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all
startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of
the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the
hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge
had been marked by the Mississippi rolling grandly by.

Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound that
he really welcomed--the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's
matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy
who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had until the winter
months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than
useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The
milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before
he had begun to take it easy, six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism
of his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in
motion by his own big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him
now. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way,
as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth
and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work
as they used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the
backs of his hands and around the thumbs.

"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully.
"She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little
spring tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."

He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on
H