He seemed to himself to be sagging like an ice-cream
in front of a fire. The darkness, too, weighed upon him. He was
abominably thirsty. Also he wanted to smoke. In addition to this, the
small of his back tickled, and he more than suspected the cupboard of
harboring mice. Not once nor twice but many hundred times he wished
that the ingenious Webster had thought of something simpler.
His was a position which would just have suited one of those Indian
mystics who sit perfectly still for twenty years, contemplating the
Infinite; but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He
tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind
from the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never
encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by
playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could
remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield, after
playing Hoylake, St. Andrews, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill, Mid-Surrey,
Walton Heath, Garden City, and the Engineers' Club at Roslyn, L.
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