He shrieked with laughter and became heavy with a desire to
sleep.

He sank deliciously down, and began to see showers of roses, when it
flashed upon him that this was not sleep, but death.

It was like lifting prodigious dumb-bells to get his eyes to open, and
a return to consciousness was like the stabbing of knives. But he opened
his eyes and roused himself.

"I won't give her up yet," he cried.

And then, by the help of God Almighty, he crawled the whole length of
the horse.

And fell asleep.

XVIII

It was a miserable, undressed thing wrapped in a horse-blanket and a
buffalo-robe that woke up in front of a red-hot stove and remembered
that it used to be Aladdin O'Brien. It had a dreadful headache, and
could smell whisky and feel warm, and that for a long time was about
all. Then it noticed that the wall opposite was ragged with loosened
wall-paper and in places stripped of plaster, so that the lathing showed
through, and that in its own head--no, in the room beyond the wall--an
impatient stamping noise of iron on wood was occurring at intervals.
Then it managed to turn its head, and it saw a big, beautiful man
sitting on the end of an old soapbox and smoking a pipe. Then it was
seized with a wrenching sickness, and the big man came quickly and held
its head and was very good to it, and it felt better and went to sleep.
After a while it descended into the Red Sea, with the avowed intention
of calling Neptune Red Renard to his face, and when it got to the
bottom, which was of red brick sprinkled with white door-knobs that
people kept diving for, it became frightened and ran and ran until it
came to the bottom of an iceberg, that had roots like a hyacinth bulb
and was looking for a place to plant itself, and it climbed up to the
top of the iceberg, which was all bulrushes, and said, "I beg your
pardon, but I forgot; I must go back and make my apologies." Then it
woke up and spoke in a weak voice.

"Peter Manners," said Aladdin, "come here."

Manners came and sat on the floor beside him.

"Feel better now?" he said.

"Tell me--" said Aladdin.

"Oh, stuff!" said Manners.

"Manners," said Aladdin, "you don't look as if you hated me any more."

"You sleep," said Manners. "That's what you need."

Aladdin thought for a long time and tried to remember what he wanted to
say, and shutting his eyes, to think better, fell asleep.

For the third time he awoke. Manners was back on the soap-box, still