"'Come, come, neighbour, don't you frighten yourself. Be calm, and listen to me. Don't let the thought of debts worry you. What little I have done in the way of business for your poor child and husband I never wish to be paid for--so there's your greatest creditor disposed of. As for the others, they won't trouble you, for I'll undertake to see that none of them shall think that you have wronged 'em. I wish I could do more, neighbor; but I ain't a rich man, and I have got a wife and a regiment of little ones at home, who won't help, in the long run, to make me richer--although I am sure they'll make me happier. But now for yourself; you must go to the fever-hospital, to have your illness out; the physician who'll take care of you there is the cleverest in all London; and, as he is an old friend of mine, I can ask him to pay especial attention to you. You'll find it a pleasant, cheerful place, much more cool and comfortable than your rooms here; the nurses are all of them good people; and while lying on your bed there you won't have to fret yourself with thinking how you are to pay for the doctors, and medicine, and kitchen physic.' "I was only too thankful to assent to all the doctor said; and forthwith he fetched a coach, put me into it, and took me off to the fever-hospital, to which his influence procured me instant admittance. Without delay I was conveyed to a large and comfortable bed, which, with another similar bed parallel to it, was placed against the wall at the end of a long gallery, containing twenty other beds. The first day of my hospital life I spent tranquilly enough; the languor of extreme exhaustion had soothed me, and my malady had not robbed me of my senses. So I lay calmly on my couch and watched all the proceedings and arrangements of the great bed-room. I noticed how clean and white all the beds looked, and what kindly women the nurses were; I remarked what a wide space there was down the middle of the room between the two rows of beds, and again what large intervals there were between the beds on each side; I observed, too, that over every bed there was a ventilator set in the wall, and beneath the ventilator a board, on which was pinned a paper, bearing, in a filled-up printed form, the number of the bed to which it belonged, the date when the occupant was admitted to the ward, the names of the physician and nurse under whose charge she was, the medicine she was taking, and the diet on which she was put. It made me smile, moreover, to note how the nurses, when giving physic or nourishment, or otherwise attending to their charges, would frequently address them by the numbers on their boards, instead of their names. "'Nurse, dear,' I asked, with a smile, when my attendant came near me, 'what's my name?' "'Oh, dear!' said she, looking up at the board which had already been fixed over my head, 'your name is Number Eleven.'