THE Sick-A-Bed Lady lived in a huge old-fashioned mahogany bedstead, with solid silk sheets, and three great squashy silk pillows edged with fluffy ruffles. On a table beside the Sick-A-Bed Lady was a tiny little, shiny little bell that tinkled exactly like silver raindrops on a golden roof, and all around this Lady and this Bedstead and this Bell was a big, square, shadowy room with a smutty fireplace, four small paned windows, and a chintzy wall-paper showered profusely with high-handled baskets of lavender flowers over which strange green birds hovered languidly. * * * * * The Sick-A-Bed Lady, herself, was as old as twenty, but she did not look more than fifteen with her little wistful white face against the creamy pillows and her soft brown hair braided in two thick pigtails and tied with great pink bows behind each ear. When the Sick-A-Bed Lady felt like sitting up high against her pillows, she could look out across the footboard through her opposite window. Now through that opposite window was a marvelous vista--an old-fashioned garden, millions of miles of ocean, and then--France! And when the wind was in just the right direction there was a perfectly wonderful smell to be smelled--part of it was Cinnamon Pink and part of it was Salt-Sea-Weed, but most of it, of course, was--France. There were days and days, too, when any one with sense could feel that the waves beat perkily against the shore with a very strong French accent, and that all one's French verbs, particularly "_J'aime_, _Tu aimes_, _Il aime_," were coming home to rest. What else was there to think about in bed but funny things like that? It was the Old Doctor who had brought the Sick-A-Bed Lady to the big white house at the edge of the Ocean, and placed her in the cool, quaint room with its front windows quizzing dreamily out to sea, and its side windows cuddled close to the curving village street. It was a long, tiresome, dangerous journey, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady in feverish fancy had moaned: "I shall die, I shall die, I shall _die_," every step of the way, but, after all, it was the Old Doctor who did the dying! Just like a snap of the finger he went at the end of two weeks, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady rallied to the shock with a plaintive: "Seems to me he was in an _awful_ hurry," and fell back on her soft bed into days of unconsciousness that were broken only by riotous visions day and night of an old man rushing frantically up to a great white throne yelling: "One, two, three, for Myself!"