ve values.
But I was not delirious. I want to state that distinctly, because when,
like a fool, I told the stripling hospital doctor what I am now about to
relate, he smiled in sickly imitation of the veteran practitioner, and
soothingly patted my counterpane. It makes me wild, even now, to recall
that superior youth pretending to humour me--a grown man with a clear
head and more experience than will be his in many a long year. The
nurses are all right--God bless them, I say--but, good Lord, what do the
sick in the hospitals not suffer from the tactless wisdom of the embryo
physicians!

However, that's neither here nor there, so I simply repeat I never was
delirious, and when I say I saw these things, I know what I am talking
about.

I lay perfectly still because I was tired. I don't remember ever to have
been so tired before or since.--Occasionally I dozed, but for the most
part I gazed steadily, hour after hour, at the brass setting of the
push-bell in the wall, too weary even to avert my gaze. I knew the room
was a ward of some hospital, but I was too indifferent to ask which one.
I could see the nurses passing back and forth. I felt one of them
resettle my pillow, which allowed me to observe a screen placed around
the adjoining bed. I knew what that meant. It was not cheerful, so I
turned again to the brass disk and watched it in sunlight, shadow,
twilight and darkness.

I was conscious too of all the different sounds about me--the stopping
and starting of the elevator--the sliding and locking of its iron
door--the rolling of the rubber-tire trucks about the halls--the
creaking of a bed--the tinkle of a glass--the rattle and clatter of
vehicles and horses in the street--even the peculiar rumble, rumble,
rumble of the cart that passed the hospital and which I took to
following through street after street, twisting and turning with it past
towering tenements and squatting rookeries, plodding along under the
broken roofs of the hissing elevated roads and over the singing trenches
of the cables--through wide avenues and narrow alleys, until I found
myself fairly launched into the sea of faces which spread out before me.

What a crowd that was! It is impossible to imagine such a scene. All the
descriptions they've written fail to picture it, for the flaring lights
with their play of shadows changed it every instant, darkening one
group, illuminating another, running up and down lines of faces,
flashing some individu