Chapter 19 Scrap iron

Visiting Day: Maria brought me a new drum.She reached over the bed rail and handed me the tin drum with the receipt.I waved him down and went to ring the bedside bell until Bruno, my orderly attendant, came into the ward to do his usual chores.Whenever Maria brought me a new drum wrapped in blue paper, Bruno would take it, untie the string, unwrap the paper, take it out almost solemnly, and fold the paper carefully.Then, with the drum in his hand, Bruno took a long stride toward the sink, running hot water, and washing the price tags off the drum hoops, being careful not to scratch the white and red paint off of them.

Maria's visits to me were brief and did not take much effort.She picked up the old drum as she was leaving, which I had broken while describing Truczynski's back, the wooden figurehead, and perhaps a little too dogmatically interpreting 1 Corinthians. I took that drum back to my cellar with all the worn-out tin drums which were partly my profession and partly served my private purposes.Maria said to me before she left: "There isn't much room in the cellar. I really don't know where to put my potatoes for the winter." I smiled slightly, and ignored the housewife's accusations from Maria. Instead, I asked her to number the retired drum with black ink in the order it already existed, and then put me on a piece of paper. The date of use of the drum written on the note and its biography were copied to a diary; for many years this diary has been hung behind the cellar door. As for the condition of my drum after 1949, It knows everything.

Maria nodded obediently, let me kiss her, and left.She still didn't understand my sense of order and felt a little uneasy.Oscar fully understood Maria's doubts, and he himself didn't understand why he collected broken tin drums so bookishly.Even more puzzling is the methodology of mentalism and metaphysics.Further expounding on the historical and materialistic, he never wanted to see the pile of scrap iron stored in the potato cellar of Belk's apartment in his life.Experience told him that the collections of the father's generation and the sons and daughters are despised.So it's not bad if his son Kurt shrugs off this unfortunate pile of drums when he gets his inheritance one day.

Why do I have to tell Maria this every three weeks?If she does it right every time, someday our storage cellar will be so full that we won't have anywhere to put our winter potatoes. Having already stored several drums in the cellar, I had a persistent thought that one day some museum would be interested in my disabled and retired drums.However, the number of times this idea flashed through my mind became less and less.Therefore, the real reason for my collection fever is not here.The more I delve into it, the more I feel that the reason for this collecting craze lies in a simple abnormal psychology: I worry that one day the tin drum will be out of stock, become rare, banned, and destroyed.One day Oskar had to find out which tinsmith had repaired some of the less badly damaged drums, and asked him to help me.That way I could get by with a few old, patched drums to get by with the dreaded drumless age.

The analysis of the causes of my hoarding fever by the doctors of the sanatorium was similar to my own analysis, only they used different terms.Miss Dr. Hohenstedt even wanted to know exactly the date of my abnormality.I can tell her with considerable certainty that it was November 9, 1938, because on that day I lost Sigismund Markus, the crowning achievement of advanced scientific thought.Demonstrating economic factors in social life, my Tin Drum Warehousekeeper.After my poor mother's death it was already difficult to get a new drum in time, because Thursdays stopped going to Arsenal Lane, and Matzerath was always procrastinating about getting me a new drum in time, and as for Jan Bronski, he comes to my door less and less.And now, with the toy store being busted again, I'm really on the brink.As soon as I saw Marcus sitting at the empty desk, I knew immediately: Marcus would not give me any more tin drums, Marcus would no longer sell toys, Marcus would never have any ties to that company again. business relationship between.So far this company has produced and supplied me with beautifully painted red and white tin drums.

At the time, however, I did not think that with the death of the toy dealer the earlier, happier days of play were over.From the ruined toy store, I picked out a good drum with two four-marked iron edges, and brought it home, thinking I was ready for hard times. I took great care with these drums, and seldom played them unless necessary.I have made it my own policy not to play the drum all afternoon, and have resignedly eliminated it at breakfast, which has so far gotten me through the day.Oskar practiced asceticism, lost weight day by day, and was taken to Dr. Hollatz and his increasingly skinny assistant nurse Inger.They gave me sweet, sour, bitter, and tasteless medicines. They said that there was something wrong with my glands. According to Dr. Hollatz, the glands were not functioning stably.Oscar didn't want to listen to Horatiz's nonsense, so he refrained from doing asceticism, so his weight increased again.By the summer of 1939, he was back to the same Oscar he had been at thirteen, his cheeks plump again, the result of knocking out the last drums he got from Marcus of.The iron sheet was cracked and full of holes, the red and white paint was peeling off and rusted, and it hung dejectedly in front of my belly.

It would be a waste of effort to ask Matzerath a favor, although he is naturally helpful and even kind, but the philosophical thought of "mind is reason" has mutual inventions with his treatises.Yes, since my poor mother died, this man is only thinking about his party.When he wanted to relax, he held meetings with other party branch leaders, or at midnight, after drinking old wine, he sat alone in the living room of my house and chatted with Hitler and Beethoven in black frames on the wall.He chatted loudly and affectionately, letting the genius explain fate to him, and the head of state explain God's will to him.When he was sober, he regarded raising donations for the Winter Relief as the destiny arranged for him by God.

I don't like to think about these fundraising Sundays.One of these days I tried in vain to get a new drum.That morning, Matzerath collected donations in front of the art-house cinema on the main road and in front of the Sternfeld department store, and came home at noon to warm up Konigsberger meatballs for himself and me.Although Matzerath's wife is dead, he still likes cooking very much, and he is indeed skilled.The meal was delicious and I still remember it today.After dinner, the sleepy fund-raiser reclined on the sofa for a nap.As soon as the sound of his breathing indicated that he was asleep, I picked up the donation box next to the piano and slipped into the shop and got under the counter.The donation box was shaped like a tin can, and I was so engrossed in looking at the most ridiculous of all tin cans.I don't want to steal the copper coins inside to get rich.I came up with the ridiculous idea of ​​trying this collection box as a tin drum.However, no matter how I beat or get the drumsticks, it always has only one answer: donate to the winter relief!Don't let a person go hungry!Don't leave a person to freeze!Donate to Winter Relief!

After half an hour, I gave up the attempt.I took the five pfennies out of the cash drawer, donated them to the winter relief effort, and put the five pfennies added to the donation box back to the piano for Matzerath to bang on for the rest of Sunday . This unsuccessful attempt cured me of my absurdity ever since.I stopped seriously trying to use tin cans, overturned buckets, and upturned bath tubs as drums.Yet I still cannot help trying to do so sometimes, also in an effort to forget these disgraceful episodes, to give them no place, or the least possible place, on this page.Canned food is not a tin drum to teach in the Federal Republic of Germany.I think the most important aspect of Marxism is along, a bucket is a bucket, and a bath tub is what people use to take a bath or wash long socks.There is no substitute for the tin drum, neither today nor then.A tin drum with red flames on a white background speaks for itself, so it needs no spokesman.

Oscar is helpless, betrayed, betrayed.At this most critical juncture, how could he keep his three-year-old face unchanged for a long time if there were no drums?Over the years, he has performed all kinds of deceitful appearances, such as sometimes wet the bed at night, babbling like a child every night for vespers, being afraid of Santa Claus (his real name is Greff), and never tire of coming up with some Typical wacky question from a three-year-old: Why do cars have wheels?Adults have become accustomed to all these artificial appearances, and they find it strange when they don't see them. As for me, I have to do all this without a drum.I'm about to give up.In desperation, I went looking for the man who, although he was not my father, was the most likely child of me.Oskar came to the Polish residential area on the ring road to wait for Jan Bronski.

After my poor mother's death, so did the relationship between Matzerath and my cousin, who in the meantime had been promoted to secretary of the post office, although they were almost friendly at times, despite their fondest mutual memories.This kind of relationship didn't happen suddenly, but changed gradually. The more intensified the political situation, the more thoroughly their relationship broke down.With the death of my mother's slender soul and plump body, the friendship between these two men also fell apart.Both of them had been reflected in her soul, both had fed on her body, and now, without this food, this convex lens, they could find nothing to replace it but to participate in politics. A meeting of opposite men who smoke the same tobacco.But neither the Polish post office nor a meeting with a shirt-clad section leader can replace a beautiful, adulterous yet emotional woman.So, in the short time between the death of my poor mother and the death of Sigismund Markus, these two men who could have been my father met several times cautiously - Matzer Rattle was wary of the customer and his party, and Young was wary of the Post Office leadership. Two or three times a month, Jan can be heard tapping her knuckles on the windowpane of my living room in the middle of the night.So Matzerath raised the curtains and opened the window a crack.At this time, both sides were in a state of embarrassment about the commentary on "Book of Changes". , in the end, either one or the other found a word out of the embarrassment and suggested playing skat in the dead of night.They brought in Greff from the greengrocer again, and if he didn't want to come—probably because of Young, but also because he was a former Boy Scout instructor (he had disbanded his troop during this time) Be careful, besides, he doesn't like to play schkatter very much, and he can't play well-it is often the baker Alexander Scheffler who is the third.The baker did not want to sit at the same table as my cousin Jan, but, firstly, out of admiration for my poor mother (which was inherited by Matzerath like an inheritance), and secondly because Scheff Le insisted on the principle that retailers must work together, so the short-legged baker was summoned by Matzerath, hurried to my house from Little Hammer Road, sat down at the living room table, and used his pale, With moth-eaten, flour-clad fingers, the cards were shuffled and dealt like buns to starving commoners. Most of these banned games started at midnight and ended at three o'clock in the morning, because Scheffler had to go to the bakery.Rarely have I been able to get out of my cot in my pajamas without noise, without being seen, and without a drum, into a dark corner under a table. As the reader has noted earlier, being under the table gave me one of the easiest ways to see: I could make comparisons.But everything has changed since my poor mother died!Jan Bronski is no longer as cautious as he used to be at the table, yet he still loses game after game, but under the table he is bold and takes my mother's legs with his shoes off and his socks on space between.There was no pornography under the skat table in those days, let alone love.Six men's legs, stretched tightly by trousers, are in different fishbone shapes, sometimes naked, preferring to wear only village trousers, with more or less hair.These six legs try to avoid contact under the table, even if it is accidental contact.The extensions above the legs—the torso, the head, and the arms—were devoted to playing cards, which for political reasons they were forbidden to play together, because every loss or every win would cause dejection or Smug reactions: Poland lost a game without a main card, while the Free City of Danzig won a game with red squares for the Greater German Reich. The day when this game of sleight of hand ends is not hard to foresee - as if all military maneuvers were to cease one day and, in view of some so-called emergency, actual wars would be fought on a wider scale . By the early summer of 1939, it became clear that Matzerath had found new poker players at the weekly meeting of party branch leaders who were not as dangerous as the Polish post office clerk and ex-Scout instructor.Jan Bronski, too, had to consider the side to which fate had assigned him, and got involved with the people at the post office, for example, with the crippled house-keeper Corbyella.He served in the legendary regiment of Marcelek Bilsudski, and since then one of his legs has been a few centimeters shorter than the other.Despite his leg, Corbyella was an able housekeeper and, besides, a very skillful man, and I hoped he might be kind enough to repair my broken drums for me.Because Kobiela could only be found through Jan Bronski, I stood near a Polish residential area almost every afternoon around six o'clock, even in spite of the unusually hot August, waiting for Jan who would probably be home on time after get off work.I didn't ask myself what your imaginary father would do after get off work, so I stood there and waited until seven o'clock, until seven thirty, but he didn't come.I could have found my cousin, Aunt Hedwig.Jan could be sick, have a fever, or have a broken leg and a cast.But Oskar stood still, content to gaze now and then at the windows and curtains of the post office secretary's apartment.A strange shyness prevented Oskar from visiting his aunt Hedwig, who grieved at the look in her motherly tender bull's eyes.Nor was he very fond of the Blonskis' children, who were probably Oscar's half-siblings.They treated him like a doll.They are willing to play with him and treat him as a toy.What right did the fifteen-year-old Stefan, who was about the same age as Oskar, treat him so arrogantly and lecture him like a father would treat a son?And Marga, with pigtails and a fat face like a rising moon, where did she have the right to treat Oskar like a fashion puppet without will, combing his hair and brushing his clothes for hours on end, manipulating him? , teach him this and that?The two of them naturally saw me as a deformed, sympathetic dwarf child who considered themselves healthy and promising, and the favorite of my grandmother Koljacek, who would not have thought of me as a sweetheart Yes, because I always make her feel difficult.A few fairy tales and comic books can't win me over.What I expected of my grandmother, even today it is a great pleasure to imagine, is very simple and therefore difficult to obtain.As soon as Oscar saw her, he would do his best to imitate his grandfather, get under her skirt and take refuge, and if possible, he would never poke his head out of this safe haven to breathe the outside air again. In order to get under my grandmother's skirt, I tried everything I could!I can't believe she really doesn't like Oscar sitting under her skirt.She always hesitated and mostly refused me.I think she would let anyone who was half like Koljacek take refuge.But I was the only one who didn't have the stature of my grandfather, nor the match that the arsonist could strike, so I had to trick the Trojan horse in order to get into that castle. Oscar watched himself play with the ball like a real three-year-old, and watched that Oscar let the ball happen to roll under his skirt, and immediately used the excuse of picking up the ball before his grandmother saw through the ruse and returned the ball to him , and suddenly got in.Grandmother wouldn't allow me to linger under her skirts for long if grown-ups were present.The grown-ups laughed at her, and often used insinuations to remind her of being a bride in the potato field that autumn, which made her naturally pale grandmother blush for a long time.This blush, combined with the almost white hair, did not make the old man over sixty look ugly. However, when my grandmother Anna is alone - which is a rare occurrence, I have seen her less and less since my poor mother died, since she stopped at the weekly meeting in Longfurt. I've hardly seen her since she set up a stall in the market--she's more willing to let me stay under her skirts longer, and I don't need to use the ball for stupid tricks.I slid across the floor with the drum, bent one leg, and supported the furniture with the other, and moved towards the direction of the big mountain of my grandmother. The layers of curtains fell at the same time, and I stayed silent for a minute, breathing through the pores of my body, wallowing in the strong, stinky smell of butter.This butter is not affected by the changes of the seasons, and its smell permeates under those four skirts.Only after this did Oscar begin to beat the drums.He knew what his grandmother liked to hear, so he knocked out the sound of October rain, just as she had heard sitting behind the potato fire, and in the sound of rain, Koljacek led The scent of the closely followed arsonist crept under her skirt.I let a slanting drizzle fall on my drum, until sighs and names of saints were called over my head.Now it is up to the reader to re-identify the sighs and calls of the saint's name that sounded in 1899, when my grandmother sat in the rain and Koljacek dry place. In those August days of 1939, when I was waiting for Jan Bronski on the street opposite the Polish settlement, I often thought of my grandmother.She might be a guest at her cousin Hedwig's.How appealing is the idea of ​​sitting under one's skirts and breathing in the smell of stinky butter!Still, I didn't go up the third floor and ring the door with the "Jan Bronski" nameplate.What could Oscar offer his grandmother?His drum was broken and there was no sound, and his drum had forgotten the sound of the slanting October rain that fell on the potato fire.As Oscar's grandmother could only deal with it with the rustling of autumn rain, Oscar still stood on the ring road, watching the No. 5 trams rattling along along the Army Meadow, seeing them approaching, and watching them go away. go.Should I wait for Yang?I didn't give up waiting, and I still stood still, because I couldn't think of a feasible way to leave at the moment?The long wait can be educational.But a long wait also induces the waiter to imagine so vividly the scene of the interview he is looking forward to, so that the waited person cannot surprise him, because he has imagined everything.Still, Jan surprised me.Desperate to see him first and to bang the wreck of the drum at the unprepared man, I stood nervously where I was, ready to draw my stick.I wanted Ironhide to yell, to make him understand my desperate situation, without having to explain myself.I said to myself: wait for five more trams, wait for three more, wait for one more; I was so anxious that I began to imagine how the Bronskis would move to Modlin or Warsaw on Jan's idea, Also seem to see him as postmaster in Bromberg and Thon.I canceled the spell I had cast just now, waited for another car, then turned around and walked on the way home.At this time, someone grabbed him from behind, and an adult covered his eyes with his hands. I felt that it was a man's hands, soft, sweat-free and comfortable, smelling of good soap, and I felt that they were Jan Bronski. He let go, laughing loudly and noticeably, and turned me around to face him.By this time I had no time to take the drum to explain my unfortunate situation.So I tucked the sticks in the back of the linen suspenders of my knee-length pants.At that time, the trousers were dirty and the pocket edges were all frayed from being left unattended.With both hands free, I lifted the drum hanging on the wretched rope, accusingly, and over the eyes, just as His Majesty Wienker held up the wafer at Mass.It would be nice if I could say "this is my flesh and blood" like him, but I didn't say a word, I just held up the stripped metal, and I didn't want to have a complete, possibly peculiar Incarnation of 1, I ask only for my drum to be repaired, and nothing else. -------- ①The second part of the Mass, which turns the communion bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus.Here is a metaphor for turning broken drums into the blood and flesh of Oscar. Jan immediately stopped his inappropriate laughter.I could hear him laughing nervously and with all his might.He looked at the drum held up in front of his eyes, and then looked away from the broken coiled iron, looking for my bright, always upright three-year-old eyes, and at first saw only two identical, Wordless blue eyes, seeing flashes and reflections and everything that people mistakenly call expressions of eyes, after he had to decide that my gaze was no different from any fun puddle in the street, he Only then did he take out all his good intentions, concentrate his memory that had not yet faded, and force himself to rediscover from my eyes my mother's pair of gray eyes, but similar in shape; From kindness to enthusiasm.But perhaps what surprised him was that he saw himself in my eyes, though that didn't necessarily mean Jan was my father, but rather my bearer.Because his eyes, my mother's eyes, and mine are all the same, innocent, sparkling, silly beauty.Almost all the Bronskis have this beauty, Stefan has it, Marga Bronski a little less, my grandmother and her brother Vinzent a little more.Apart from my black eyelashes and blue eyes, it cannot be denied that I have been mixed with the blood of the arsonist Koljacek--it is enough to think of my ability to sing broken glass--but point out that I have The characteristics of the Rhinelander Matzerath are really not easy. In that moment when I raised my drum and let my eyes do their thing, Jan, who is usually evasive when confronted with straightforward questions, had to admit: "It was his mother, Agnes, looking at me. Maybe it was me. I look at myself. His mother and I, we have a lot in common. But it could also be my uncle Koljacek who is looking at me, who is now in America, or at the bottom of the sea. Only Matzera It's good that Teddy isn't looking at me." Yang took the drum from me, turned it around, and tapped it.His hands were clumsy and he couldn't even sharpen a pencil, but he looked as if he knew something about repairing drums.This man of few resolutions evidently made up his mind, and seized my hand with a swiftness which astonished me, which I had never seen before.He helped me across the ring road to the trolleybus stop at the army playground. As soon as the tram arrived, he pulled me into the No. 5 bus that allowed smoking. Oskar guessed that we were driving into the city, to Hevelius Square, to the Polish Post Office to see Kobiela the house-sitter.He has both the tools and the skill that Oscar's drum has been waiting for for weeks. If this day had not been the eve of September 1, 1939, our trip would have been quiet and joyful.However, from Max Halbeplatz, the No. 5 tram, with its trailers, was packed with weary but still rowdy tourists returning from the Bressen beach, tinkling toward the city.If the port opposite Westerplatte had not anchored the two battleships "Schleswig" and "Schleswig-Holstein"②, if their steel hulls, rotating What a late summer evening awaited us if the turrets and cannons hadn't appeared behind the red brick walls.After we handed over the drums to Corbyella, we would go to the Café Weizke and set out two fruit sodas and two straws.If within the last few months the interior of the post office had not been steeled to make it a fortress, if the good post office workers, officers and postmen had not been trained every weekend in Göttingen and Oakshoeft to become a For the defenders of the fortress, then, how wonderful it would be to go to the post office, ring the porter's bell, and entrust the caretaker Corbyella to repair the tin drum played by the harmless children! -------- ①In the early morning of this day, Hitler's German army of 1.5 million invaded Poland, and then Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II broke out. ② On August 25, 1939, the two warships sailed into Danzig in the name of a visit. At around 4:45 in the morning on September 1, 1939, they bombarded the Polish arsenal and garrison in Westerplatte. We are almost at Porta Oliva.Jan Bronski, drenched in sweat, stared blankly at the dusty green trees of the Hindenburg Allee.He smoked cigarette after gold-tipped cigarette more than his principles of economy would allow.Oscar had never seen his imaginary father sweat like this, except for two or three times in the past, when Jan was on the couch with his mother. But, my poor mom is long dead.Why is Jan Bronski still sweating?So I found that almost every time he approached a station, he wanted to get off, and every time he was about to get off, he remembered that I was in front of him, and it was me and my drum that made him sit down again.Only then did I understand that he was sweating because of the Polish Post Office, which he was a state official and had to defend.He sneaked out of the post office, met me and my broken drum at the roundabout around the corner of Army Field, decided to go back to his duties, and dragged me along, sweating and smoking like hell.But what about me?Neither officer nor useful for guarding the post office building.Why didn't he get out of the car again?I'm sure I won't stop him.He was in his prime at the time, not yet forty-five years old, with blue eyes, brown hair, and habitually shaking hands.If he hadn't sweated so pitifully, it would have been cologne, not cold sweat, that would have reached Oskar's nose as he sat next to his imaginary father. We got off at the timber market and walked down the old city moat.It was a windless late summer night.As usual, at eight o'clock, the old city bell rang through the sky, startling the pigeons all over the sky.The bell sang: "You will be faithful and honest all your life, until you enter the cold grave." The bell is so beautiful that it makes people cry.But there was laughter everywhere.Women lead sunburned children in terry bathrobes, colorful balloons and sailboats, off the trams that carry thousands of tourists from Great Cow and Hoybud just after their tour. swimmer.Young girl with sleepy eyes sticking out her tongue and licking raspberry ice cream.A fifteen-year-old girl dropped her ice cream on the floor.She had bent down to pick it up again, but hesitated, leaving it on the road, to let the soles of brave passers-by trample on the melted cold drink.This girl will soon join the ranks of grown-ups, no longer licking ice cream on the street. At the entrance to Schneidermeer we turn left.The Hevelius Square at the entrance of the alley was blocked by the militiamen under the SS.They stood in groups, young lads and men who were now heads of households, wearing armbands and carrying security police guns.It is very easy to avoid this blockade, as long as you take a small detour, you can reach the post office through Rem.Jan Bronski walked towards the militiamen.His intentions could not have been more clear.His superiors must have sent someone from the post office building to observe what was going on in Hevelius Square.Jan wanted them to see how he was stopped and turned back, so that at least he became a half-hero, but he was stopped, so he was equally honored and disgraceful, so he could ride in the five The streetcar went home.The civilian army just let us go, maybe they didn't expect that the well-dressed gentleman led a three-year-old child to the post office building.They politely advised us to be more careful, but it was only when we were through the iron bars and standing in front of the post office gate that they shouted, "Stop!" Jan wavered and turned away.At this time, the heavy door had opened a crack, and we were dragged in.We entered the Polish Post Office and stood in the semi-dark, shady business hall full of counter windows. Jan Bronski's colleagues greeted him, but not in a friendly way.They didn't trust him, they might have given up hope in him, and some said loudly and frankly that they already suspected him: Jan Bronski, the post office secretary, was deserting.Jan struggled to defend himself.They didn't listen to him at all, but pushed him into the long line of people whose task was to pass the sandbags one by one from the cellar to the windows of the business hall.They piled sandbags and similar waste under the windows and pushed heavy furniture like filing cabinets next to the door so it could be quickly barred if necessary. Someone asked who I was, but before Jan could answer, the man turned around and walked away.They were all nervous, and when they spoke, they spoke very loudly, and then cautiously and lowered their voices.My drum, and the urgency of my drum, seem to have been completely forgotten.I had hoped that Corbyella, the caretaker, would help me restore the pile of scrap metal in front of my belly, but he didn't show up.Perhaps he was on the second or third floor of the post office, working as desperately as the postmen and clerks in the lobby, stacking the bulging sandbags that were said to be bulletproof.Oskar's stay here embarrasses Jan Bronski.So, I slipped away while listening to a man give him instructions.The man in the Polish helmet, known as Dr. Michan, was obviously the postmaster.I carefully walked around Mr. Michan, looked around, and finally found the stairs to the second floor.At the end of the hallway on the second floor, I found another medium-sized, windowless room where there were no men lugging ammunition boxes or stacking sandbags. On the floor was a rolling laundry basket full of letters with various stamps.The room is low and the wallpaper is negative.There was a faint rubber smell in the room.A light bulb was on, without a shade.Oscar was so tired that he didn't look for the light switch.In the distance, the bells of Santa Maria, Santa Catarina, St. John, St. Brigitte, St. Barbara, Trinity, and Eucharist are saying: Nine o'clock, little Oscar, you It's time to go to bed! —and so I lay down in a mail basket, with the same exhausted drum lying beside me, and fell asleep.