He looked from the reflection to the light itself, and thus his eyes turned upward.
An expression of surprise changed to mirth, and then dropping his glance until it met mine, he said:
“Have you noticed anything peculiar about this awning?”
“No, what is it?”
“Simply that there is no awning. Look up and see. Here are the posts and there is the framework, but only the sky is above, and we've been getting rained upon for the past ten minutes in blissful ignorance.”
It was as he said, so we ran to the next awning, which was a fact, not a figment of fancy.
“That reminds me,” resumed my friend, “of Simpkins. He was a young man who used to catch cold at the slightest dampness. His being out in the rain without an umbrella never failed to result in his remaining in the house for two or three subsequent days.
“One night, Simpkins, surprised by an unexpected shower, took refuge beneath the framework of an awning, which framework lacked the awning itself. He waited for an hour, until the shower had passed, and then joyously took up again his homeward way, without having observed his mistake. He told me on the next day of his narrow escape from the rain. I happened to know that the awning to which he alluded had been removed a few weeks before. But I did not tell him so until there no longer seemed to exist any likelihood of his catching cold from that wetting. You see, his imagination had saved him.”
“That tale is singularly reminiscent of those dear old stories about the man who took cold through sitting at a window that was composed of one solid sheet of glass, so clean that he thought it was no glass at all; and the men who, awaking in the night, stifling for want of fresh air, broke open the door of a bookcase which they took to be a window, and immediately noticed a pleasant draught of pure outside air.”
“There is a likeness, which simply goes toward proving the truth of all three accounts. But the remarkable thing about Simpkins' case is that when he once learned that there had been nothing over his head during that rain, he immediately caught cold, although two weeks had passed since the night of the shower. Wonderful, wasn't it?”