“If you would leave the theatre alone you wouldn’t be quite so short as you are now,” asserted Uncle Nate, almost popping open with contempt.

“‘Short,’ man!  ‘Short’ in your throat!” shouted I, forgetting myself.

“Yes, short; and it’s my opinion you’ve shorted me in this business.”

I could not kick our uncle out of his premises, so I got out myself, not to return; and I left in debt to him as well as to the rest of the world.  I went homeward.  Though it was August, a cold wind blew from the lake, whipping the large, flapping leaves of the castor-bean plants in the front yards to rags.  I quaffed the lake in the wet wind.  “No wonder,” I thought, “we’re three parts water:  our world is.”  A young fellow on the street-car platform smoked a cigar that smelled like pigweed, cabbage-stalks and other garden rubbish burning, and made me sick.  He enjoyed it, though:  in fact, all, including the street-car driver himself, were on that day more than usually engaged in the intense enjoyment of being Chicagoans.  All but me, miserable.  The very windows and pavements of our streets, being clean and cold, sent a chill to my bones.

When I reached home Lydia was pinning on her habergeon, her neck-armor of ribbons and lace, before the mirror.  “What is this?” I asked, pointing to the suspicious note, still pinned to the cushion.

“That’s the note that has to be found in my room in the play of Lost in London,” she answered, turning the great lamps of her eyes on mine.

As I had nothing to say to this, I went and lay down on the sofa before the parlor-fire.  Though a grate in January is a poor affair—­I never knew any human being who really depended on one in winter to speak in praise of it—­on a cool August day it is delicious.  I fell into a warm doze before the fire, then into a series of agreeable naps.  When Lydia said supper was ready I did not want any, and at bedtime I was too stiff to move easily.

After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing.  Luxurious indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar—­a satisfaction in seeing the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,

  While day sank or mounted higher,
  The light, aerial gallery, golden railed,
  Burn like a fringe of fire

on some remote palace of the city.  These and other sensations of malarial fever occupied me for a while.  In half dreams I then enjoyed the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned.  Light diet and keeping quiet—­which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this fever—­cured me.  I came forth looking like a swairth, one of those words marked “obs.” in the dictionary—­means phantom of a person about to die.  It ought to be revived; so here goes—­swairth.