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[Page 586]

As the big black bird glided down towards one of these troughs there was a crash thud, the rope quivered, I was standing alongside its fastened end, the feathered monster somersaulted at least once and struck the water. He shook his head, pulled himself together and rapidly was soon far astern of the vessel. I watched him with my field glasses and for several miles he was unable to rise. A crowd of sympathisers, or was it cannibals, mayhap surgeons and nurses, remained with him. My diagnosis was that he had broken a wing close to the chest, and as a consequence he was totally disabled.
'Tis afternoon. A sleep for a couple of hours is the next item on the programme. Tata. Tata.

5-15 p.m. – Awake. Two hours in oblivion! Sleep the gift, no greater, from God. He who cannot sleep is deficient in that which brings to each member of the human family chance for repair, when the blood stream, and its subsidiary building up cells, has uninterfered with opportunities for restoring worn out tissues from crown of head to soles of feet, a period of sweet forgetfulness, wherein the harried soul recognises not its tormentors and cares not where they be, and the physical parts know not pain.

Dreams, fellows to the period between wakefulness and sleep, are thoughts which fly round the world in the twinkling of an eye, or deal with affairs close at hand in moments few though they appear to compass hours long in their performing; they, like other mental work, are the sequel to some act of the individual compassed by seeing

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