“I don’t know. There’s nothing the matter with the room that I can see; it seems well-ventilated; the chimney’s not stopped up. Yet this is the third night that I cannot get to sleep in it.”
“But why can you not get to sleep?” I persisted.
“I say I don’t know why. Each night I have been as sleepy as possible; last night I could hardly undress I was so sleepy; but no sooner am I in bed than sleep goes right away from me. Not only that: I grow terribly restless.”
Weighing the problem this way and that, an idea struck me.
“John, do you think it is nervousness?”
“How can it be? I never was nervous in my life.”
“I mean this: not sleeping the first night, you may have got nervous about it the second and third.”
He shook his head. “I have been nothing of the kind, Johnny. But look here: I hardly see what I am to do. I cannot go on like this without sleep; yet, if I tell the mother again, she’ll say the air of the place does not suit me and run away from it——”
“Suppose we change rooms to-night, John?” I interrupted. “I can’t think but you would sleep here. If you do not, why, it must be the air of Pumpwater, and the sooner you are out of it the better.”