The other dream was of being buried alive.

I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much as the last joint of my little finger.  Yet every nerve of me ached with sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the moisture of terror.

* * * * *

From head to foot hot flushes swept over me.  And I was stung with the pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was bathed in cold sweats.  And I hoped I was dying.

* * * * *

“Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?” And my father fixed his eyes on me.

“Nothing, Father!”

“If you weren’t such a good boy, I’d—­” and he halted, to continue, “as it is, you’re a clean boy, and I’m proud of you.”

I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I could not.

“I wonder,” he added with alarm in his voice, “I wonder if you’re catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be careful of yourself.”

I told him I would be careful....

“I think I’ll send you back home to visit the folks this fall.”

* * * * *

There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our second story flat—­a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the window, “Home Cooking.”  The sign itself was of a dull, dirty, fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the nice palate.

The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora....  Flora did but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food ... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or languidly peeling potatoes.

Flora’s vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red that it made me think of Paul’s ferret—­she bustled and buzzed about, doing most of the work.

* * * * *

Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I would go down to her.  Soon two potato knives would be working.

“Come and sit by me in the hammock.”

I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.

This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an infatuation for her,—­I thought I was in love with her,—­though I never quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.

She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.