is awful
discovery. As it was I yelled silently. For of all terrors upon earth,
sleep-walking was the one I dreaded the most. Not that I had ever
walked myself, or, indeed, enjoyed the embarrassing friendship of any
one who did. But I had read the books and knew all about it. I would
sooner have faced a dozen ghosts than a somnambulist.

I had no doubt in my mind that the Dux's empty bed was to be accounted
for in this uncanny manner, and that the shot and yell were intimately
connected with his mysterious disappearance. Now I thought of it, he
had not been himself for some time. For a whole week he had not licked
me. Ever since he had got his entrance scholarship at Low Heath he had
been queerer than ever. He had not broken any rule of importance; he
had been on almost friendly terms with Faulkner; he had even ceased to
plot the assassination of Plummer. He was evidently in a low state, and
suffering from unusual nervous excitement, thus violently to interrupt
the usual tenor of his way; and, as I knew, such a state lends itself
readily to the grisly practice of somnambulism.

What was to be done? Yell? I couldn't do it for the life of me. Get
up and look for him? Wild horses could not have dragged a toe of me out
of bed. Stay where I was till the unearthly truant returned? No, thank
you. At the bare notion my rigid muscles relaxed, my erect hair lay
down, and I collapsed, a limp heap, on to the pillow, with every
available sheet and blanket drawn over my tightly closed eyes.

And yet, in my unimpassioned moments, I do not think I was a notorious
coward. I had stood up to Faulkner's round-arms without pads, and
actually blocked one of them once, and that was more than some of the
fellows could say, I could take my header into the pool from the same
step as Parkin. And once I had not run away from Hector when he broke
loose from his kennel. Even now, but for the dim recollection of that
awful automatic machine, I might have pulled myself together
sufficiently to strike a light and jog my next-bed neighbour into
wakefulness.

But somehow my nerves had suffered a shock, and since there was no one
near to witness my poltroonery, and as, moreover, the night was chilly
enough to warrant reasonable precautions against cold, I preferred on
the whole to keep my head under the clothes, and drop for a season, so
to speak, below the surface of human affairs.

But existence below the sheets, when prolonged