His restlessness grew. Again he walked round and round the room. There was a glow in his breast. Something that burned and fired his nerves and drove him as one is driven in a dream. Either he must rush outdoors and wander at a feverish pace around the town and up the lake shore--walk all night--or he must sit down and write. He sat down. Picked up an atlas of Humphrey's and wrote on his lap. And he wrote, from the beginning, as he would have walked had he gone out, in a fever of energy, gripping the pencil tightly, holding his knees up a little, heels off the floor. The colour reappeared about his forehead and temples, then on his cheeks. When Humphrey came in, after midnight, he was in just this posture, writing at a desperate rate. The floor all about him was strewn with sheets of paper. One or two had drifted off to the centre of the room. He didn't hear his friend come up the stairs.' When he saw him, standing, looking down, something puzzled, he cried out excitedly':-- 'Don't Hump!' Humphrey resisted the impulse to reply with a 'Don't what?' 'Go on! Don't disturb me!' 'You seem to be hitting it up.' 'I am. I can't talk! Please--go away! Go to bed. You'll make me lose it!' Humphrey obeyed. Later--well along in the night--he awoke. There was a crack of light about his door. He turned on his own light. It was quarter to three. 'Here!' he called. 'What on earth are you up to, Hen?' A chair scraped. Then Henry came to the door and burst it open. His coat was off now, and his vest open. He had unbuttoned his collar in front so that the two ends and the ends of his tie hung down. His hair was straggling down over his forehead. 'Do you know what time it is, Hen?' 'No. Say--listen to this! Just a few sentences. You liked the piece I did about the Business Men's Picnic, remember. Well, this has sorta grown out of it. It's just the plain folks along Simpson Street. Say! There's a title for the book.' 'For the what!' 'The book. Oh, there'll be a lot of them. Sorta sketches. Or maybe they're stories. I can't tell yet. Plain folks of Simpson Street. Yes, that's good. Wait a second, while I write it down. The thing struck me all at once--to-night!--Queer, isn't it!--thinking about the folks along the street--Bill Hemple, and Jim Smith in your press room with the tattooed arms, and old Boice and Charlie Waterhouse, and the way Bob McGibbon blew into town with a big dream, and the barber shop--Schultz and Schwartz's--and Donovan's soda fountain, and Izzy Bloom and the trouble about his boys in the high school, and all his fires, and Mr Draine, the Y.M.C.A. secretary that's been in the British Mounted Police in Mashonaland--think of it! In Africa--and----' 'Would you mind'--Humphrey was on an elbow, blinking sleepy eyes--'would you mind talking a little more slowly. Good lord! I can't----'