In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick man "sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes _sides_ oftener than a politician." How true this is--even to the italicised word--I discovered for myself after a personal encounter with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet seemingly a land without limit,--who dares circumscribe the imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow is his throne--from it he issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of officious advisers. But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled. He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas! Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant. In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them." And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast. The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever. Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say--I read their meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated--we shall have this fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well too rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give, I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"--as the unchristian unscientists say--on the nurse, my nurse.