I wondered grimly as six o’clock drew near, the hour at which the rest of the company usually burst into activity, whether there would be many exclamations of healthy and jolly that day. There is a point, I should say, at which a thing or a condition becomes so excessively healthy and jolly that it ceases to be either. I drew the curtain of my bunk together--for a great upheaval over my head warned me that my wife was going to descend and dress--and feigned slumber. Sleep seemed to me such a safe thing. You cannot make a man rise and do what you consider his duty if he will not wake up. The only free man, I reflected with my eyes tightly shut, is the man who is asleep. Pushing my reflection a little further I saw with a slight start that real freedom and independence are only, then, to be found in the unconscious--a race (or sect; call it what you will) of persons untouched by and above the law. And one step further and I saw with another slight start that perfect freedom, perfect liberty, perfect deliverance from trammels, are only to be found in a person who is not merely unconscious but also dead. These, of course, as I need not tell my hearers, are metaphysics. I do not often embark on their upsetting billows for I am, principally, a practical man. But on this occasion they were not as fruitless as usual, for the thought of a person dead suggested at once the thought of a person engaged in going through the sickness preliminary to being dead, and a sick man is also to a certain extent free--nobody, that is, can make him get up and go out into the rain and hold his umbrella over Jellaby’s back while he concocts his terrible porridge. I decided that I would slightly exaggerate the feelings of discomfort which I undoubtedly felt, and take a day off in the haven of my bed. Let them see to it that the horse was led; a man in bed cannot lead a horse. Nor would it even be an exaggeration, for one who has been wakeful half the night cannot be said to be in normal health. Besides, if you come to that, who is in normal health? I should say no one. Certainly hardly any one. And if you appeal to youth as an instance, what could be younger and yet more convulsed with apparent torment than the newly born infant? Hardly any one, I maintain, is well without stopping during a single whole day. One forgets, by means of the anodynes of work or society or other excitement; but cut off a person’s means of doing anything or seeing any one and he will soon find out that at least his head is aching. When, therefore, Edelgard had reached the stage of tidying the caravan, arranging my clothes, and emptying the water out of the window preparatory to my dressing, I put the curtains aside and beckoned to her and made her understand by dint of much shouting (for the rain still pelted on the roof) that I was feeling very weak and could not get up.