They were very long, pleasant days in early December.  The sunshine was pale, but it suited his hurt eyes better:  it crept slowly in the mornings over the snuff-colored carpet on the floor, up the brown foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind shook the window-curtains, made little crimson pools of mottled light over the ceiling,—­curdling pools, that he liked to watch:  going off, from the clean gray walls and rustling curtain and transparent crimson, into sleeps that lasted all day.

He was not conscious how he knew he was in a hospital:  but he did know it, vaguely; thought sometimes of the long halls outside of the door with ranges of rooms opening into them, like this, and of very barns of rooms on the other side of the building with rows of white cots where the poor patients lay:  a stretch of travel from which his brain came back to his snug fireplace, quite tired, and to Lois sitting knitting by it.  He called the little Welsh-woman, “Sister,” too, who used to come in a stuff dress, and white bands about her face, to give his medicine and gossip with Lois in the evening:  she had a comical voice, like a cricket chirping.  There was another with a real Scotch brogue, who came and listened sometimes, bringing a basket of undarned stockings:  the doctor told him one day how fearless and skilful she was, every summer going to New Orleans when the yellow fever came.  She died there the next June:  but Holmes never, somehow, could realize a martyr in the cheery, freckled-faced woman whom he always remembered darning stockings in the quiet fire-light.  It was very quiet; the voices about him were pleasant and low.  If he had drifted from any shock of pain into a sleep like death, some of the stillness hung about him yet; but the outer life was homely and fresh and natural.

The doctor used to talk to him a little; and sometimes one or two of the patients from the eye-ward would grow tired of sitting about in the garden-alleys, and would loiter in, if Lois would give them leave; but their talk wearied him, jarred him as strangely as if one had begun on politics and price-currents to the silent souls in Hades.  It was enough thought for him to listen to the whispered stories of the sisters in the long evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to them; to look drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon sunshine was still so summer-like that a few hollyhocks persisted in showing their honest red faces along the walls, and the very leaves that filled the paths would not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy brown.  One of the sisters had a poultry-yard in it, which he could see:  the wall around it was of stone covered with a brown feathery lichen, which every rooster in that yard was determined to stand on, or perish in the attempt; and Holmes would watch, through the quiet, bright mornings, the frantic ambition and the uproarious exultation of the successful aspirant with an amused smile.

“One’d thenk,” said Lois, sagely, “a chicken never stood on a wall before, to hear ’em, or a hen laid an egg.”