"It would be hard for me to give you, sir, any notion of how these words, _Number Eleven_, took possession of my mind. This was the more strange, because the nurse did not usually call me by them; for she was a motherly creature, and almost always addressed me as 'poor dear,' or 'poor child'; and the doctors who had the charge of me spoke to me as 'friend,' or 'old friend,' or 'neighbor.' But all the same for that, I always thought of myself as Number Eleven; and ere many days, if any one had asked me what my name was, I could not for the life of me have remembered Abigail Mallet, but should have answered Number Eleven. The patient in the next bed to me was Number Twenty-two; she was, like myself, a poor woman who had just lost a husband and child by the fever, and both of us were much struck, and then drawn to each other, by discovering how we had suffered alike. We often interchanged a few words during the sorrowful hours of the long, hot nights, but our whisperings always turned on the same subject. 'Number Eleven,' I used to hear her poor thin lips murmur, 'are you thinking of your baby, dear?' 'To be sure, darling,' I would answer; 'I am awake, and when I am awake, I am always thinking of her.' Then most times she would inquire, 'Number Eleven, dear, which do you think of most--the little one or her father?' Whereto I would reply, 'I think of both alike, dear, for whenever I look at her, a fair young angel in heaven--she seems to be lying in her father's arms.' And after we had conversed so, No. 22 would be quiet for a few minutes; and often, in the silence of the night, I could at such times hear that which informed me the poor woman was weeping to herself--in such a way that she was happier for her tears. "But my malady progressed unfavourably. Each succeeding night was worse to endure; and the morning light, instead of bringing refreshment and hope, only gave to me a dull, gloomy consciousness that I had passed hours in delirium, and that I was weaker and heavier in heart, and more unlikely than ever to hold my head up again. They cut all the hair off my head, and put blisters at the back of my neck; but the awful weight of sorrow and the gnawing heat kept on my brain all the same. I could no longer amuse myself with looking at what went on in the ward; I lost all care for the poor woman who lay in the next bed; and soon I tossed to and fro, and heeded nothing of the outer world except the burning, and aching, and thirst, and sleeplessness that encased me.