queer hat with green ribbons. I told the doctor this, guardedly,
the next morning, and he said it was the morphia, and that I was
lucky not to have seen a row of devils with green tails.

I don't know anything about the wreck of September ninth last. You
who swallowed the details with your coffee and digested the horrors
with your chop, probably know a great deal more than I do. I
remember very distinctly that the jumping and throbbing in my arm
brought me back to a world that at first was nothing but sky, a
heap of clouds that I thought hazily were the meringue on a blue
charlotte russe. As the sense of hearing was slowly added to vision,
I heard a woman near me sobbing that she had lost her hat pin, and
she couldn't keep her hat on.

I think I dropped back into unconsciousness again, for the next
thing I remember was of my blue patch of sky clouded with smoke, of
a strange roaring and crackling, of a rain of fiery sparks on my
face and of somebody beating at me with feeble hands. I opened my
eyes and closed them again: the girl in blue was bending over me.
With that imperviousness to big things and keenness to small that
is the first effect of shock, I tried to be facetious, when a spark
stung my cheek.

"You will have to rouse yourself!" the girl was repeating
desperately. "You've been on fire twice already." A piece of
striped ticking floated slowly over my head. As the wind caught it
its charring edges leaped into flame.

"Looks like a kite, doesn't it?" I remarked cheerfully. And then,
as my arm gave an excruciating throb--"Jove, how my arm hurts!"