It was her favorite way of wooing sleep.

She had done it all her life--sunk into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the last on her fading consciousness.

But this mother was not the Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype.

They had been before Saxon's time.

This that she saw nightly was an older mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept, always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering, dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and whom not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep.