Volume III.—Fast Asleep.
The poor patient at Slocum-on-Slush moaned. He had been practically awake for a month, and nothing could send him to sleep. The Doctor held his wrist, and as he felt the rapid beats of his pulse became graver and graver.
"And you have no friends, no relatives?"
"No. My only visitor was the man who brought that box of books from a metropolitan library."
"A box of books!" exclaimed the Doctor. "There may yet be time to save his life!"
The man of science rose abruptly, and approaching the casket containing the current literature of the day, roughly forced it open. He hurriedly inspected its contents. He turned over the volumes impatiently until he reached a set.
"The very thing!" he murmured. "If I can but get him to read this he will be saved." Then turning to his patient he continued, "You should peruse this novel. It is one that I recommend in cases such as yours."
"I am afraid I am past reading," returned the invalid. "However, I will do my best."
An hour later the Doctor (who had had to make some calls) returned and found that his patient was sleeping peacefully. The first volume of Douglas the Doomed One had the desired result.
"Excellent, excellent," murmured the medico. "It had the same effect upon another of my patients. The crisis is over! He will now recover like the other. Insomnia has been conquered for the second time by Douglas the Doomed One, and who now shall say that the three-volume novel of the amateur is not a means of spreading civilisation? It must be a mine of wealth to somebody."