Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/56

52 close your eyes, for you are so tired. Hark! now they play "hop scotch" along the extremities. You give a sudden brush with your hand; but you hit nothing. Now they commence a tramp up, up, up! it is no longer endurable. Out of bed, off comes the night-dress, turned wrong-side-out. In the greatest apparent rage at the harmless piece of cotton, you thrash it most vigorously against imaginary chairs, get into it again, lift up the sheets and go through the same pantomime against bed-posts and foot-boards, which exist only in your memory of things, in an entirely past epoch of your life's history. Now they are spread anew over the no longer unsuspected bed. The sleepy little Miss Alice is packed in after having received a thorough brushing, of which she takes cognizance only in broken dreams. You lay yourself away wearily——oh, so wearily—after a whole week's travel, and no true interval of rest, hoping to get asleep before you are again taken possession of. What a futile hope. Here they come like a herd of homœopathic buffaloes, as if by a preconcerted signal, making head-quarters on the open prairie between the high bluffs of your