I could hardly speak to my father that night.  I avoided him.

* * * * *

At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid down an endless black abyss.  The abyss was my bed’s edge and I found myself on the floor.  When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things to stand up.  I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily.  I tumbled backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books I had read—­all to evaporate as my father’s face grew, from a cluster of white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into him.

“Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?”

“Please go away from me and let me alone.”  I turned my face to the wall in loathing.

“I’ll call a doctor.”

* * * * *

The doctor came.  He felt my pulse.  Put something under my tongue.  Whispered my father in a room, apart.  Left.

My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.

“What did the doctor say?” I forced myself to ask of him.

“To be frank, Johnnie ... you’re old enough to learn the truth ... he thinks you’re taken down with consumption.”

“That’s what my mother died of.”

My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands.  I felt a little sorry for him, then.

“Well you’ve got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or something.”

* * * * *

I began to get ready for my trip West.  Surely enough, I had consumption, if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of blood ... night-sweats....

But my mind was quickened:  I read Morley’s History of English Literature ...  Chaucer all through ...  Spenser ... even Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Lydgate’s ballads ... my recent discovery of Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.

As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.

* * * * *

The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years, when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to employ me.  This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that would save my life—­work in the open air.  My father had written Uncle Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.

“I won’t become a clod-hopper,” I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless monotony of such a life.

“But it will do you good.  It will be a fine experience for you.”

“If it’s such a fine experience why don’t you go and do it?”

“I won’t stand any nonsense.”

“I’d rather die....  I’m going to die anyhow.”