He said he couldn't make out anything but a kind of scraping in a
door-lock. His theory was that in his childhood it had been a much
completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken down in a sort of
decadence, and now there was nothing left of it but that scraping in the
door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a misfit key. I used to throw
things at his door, and once I tried a cold-water douche from the
pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but that was rather brutal, and
after a while I used to let him roar himself awake; he would always do
it, if I trusted to nature; and before our junior year was out I got so
that I could sleep through, pretty calmly; I would just say to myself
when he fetched me to the surface with a yell, 'That's Melford
dreaming,' and doze off sweetly."
"Jove!" Rulledge said, "I don't see how you could stand it."
"There's everything in habit, Rulledge," Minver put in. "Perhaps our
friend only dreamt that he heard a dream."
"That's quite possible," the stranger owned, politely. "But the case is
superficially as I state it.
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