as quietly as possible, so as not to wake
her up.

Some way on in the spring Peer fell sick. When the doctor came, he
looked round the room, sniffed, and frowned. "Do you call this a place
for human beings to live in?" he asked Louise, who had taken the day
off. "How can you expect to keep well?"

He examined Peer, who lay coughing, his face a burning red. "Yes,
yes--just as I expected. Inflammation of the lungs." He glanced round
the room once more. "Better get him off to the hospital at once," he
said.

Louise sat there in terror at the idea that Peer was to be taken away.
And then, as the doctor was going, he looked at her more closely, and
said: "You'd do well to be a bit careful yourself, my good girl. You
look as if you wanted a change to a decent room, with a little more
light and air, pretty badly. Good-morning."

Soon after he was gone the hospital ambulance arrived. Peer was carried
down the stairs on a stretcher, and the green-painted box on wheels
opened its door and swallowed him up; and they would not even let her go
with him. All through the evening she sat in their room alone, sobbing.

The hospital was one of the good old-fashioned kind that people don't
come near if they can help it, because the walls seem to reek of the
discomfort and wretchedness that reign inside. The general wards--where
the poor folks went--were always so overcrowded that patients with all
sorts of different diseases had to be packed into the same rooms, and
often infected each other. When an operation was to be performed, things
were managed in the most cheerfully casual way: the patient was laid
on a stretcher and carried across the open yard, often in the depth of
winter, and as he was always covered up with a rug, the others usually
thought he was being taken off to the dead-house.

When Peer opened his eyes, he was aware of a man in a white blouse
standing by the foot of his bed. "Why, I believe he's coming-to," said
the man, who seemed to be a doctor. Peer found out afterwards from a
nurse that he had been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours.

He lay there, day after day, conscious of nothing but the stabbing of
a red-hot iron boring through his chest and cutting off his breathing.
Some one would come every now and then and pour port wine and naphtha
into his mouth; and morning and evening he was washed carefully with
warm water by gentle hands. But little by little the room grew lighter,
and his gruel began