I made a new acquaintance that winter—a wretched little blue devil to whom I gave the name of Grumpy, and with whom I battled from morning till night, and especially from night till morning. It is not pain that blue devils thrive on—I had proved that all these many years; it is idleness that gives them their chance for mischief—the helpless idleness of utter exhaustion, when one’s thoughts hang vacant, and body nor mind can longer force its way past the wall of pain to move, however slowly, in the beautiful outside world of human effort and achievement. So Grumpy came to Bird Corners. Satan himself knows no self-respecting devil would have stayed on the premises after the way I treated the creature; but blue devils respect neither themselves nor anybody else. An hour after I had flung him out by the heels he would bob up by the sofa in the finest fettle imaginable, grinning at my exhaustion from our late encounter. The most I ever could be sure of doing was keeping him invisible to every one else; but he made up for that in the nights. Still, one adjusts one’s self to the inevitable in time; and blue devils are all in the day’s work, I suppose, like the dentist or a cold in one’s head. One gets through with the visitation somehow, and laughs afterward because, for the time, at least, it is over. When the children came home in the summer there was trouble, of course. Doctors came and went, though I had privately done my full duty by them long before; and I swallowed a deal of nasty stuff which did absolutely no good, except that it soothed the feelings of the family. By the end of the summer David was insisting on something radical; and when he went back to college he took me with him, and deposited me in a northern sanitarium, where I was to lie flat on my back three months, and be made over as good as new. This was not only radical, but revolutionary. Chatterton had never before furnished an inmate for a sanitarium. The word, indeed, was commonly understood as a polite euphemism for a lunatic asylum. The sentiments of the kin ranged all the way from Grace Wood’s anxious hopefulness to Cousin Jane’s frank curiosity concerning what new kind of craziness Lyddy had been up to now, to make John Bird feel like she had to be shut up in a private mad-house. She took my part, however, so far as to say, both to my face and behind my back, that I wasn’t a mite crazier than I’d been all my life; and if folks could get along with me this long it did look like a pity they couldn’t put up with me a while longer, and save disgracing the family. There was nothing the matter with me, Cousin Jane opined, beyond being spoiled to death, and lazy; and, anyway, it was flying in the face of Providence to go on living if your time had come to die.