The Flying Death by Samuel Hopkins Adams To Schuyler C. Brandt in token of a friendship which, begun at old Hamilton, has endured and strengthened, as only college friendships can, for an unbroken twenty years, this book is dedicated. Contents CHAPTER ONE THE INSOMNIAC STANLEY RICHARD COLTON, M. D., heaved his powerful form to and fro in his bed and cursed the day he had come to Montant Point, which chanced to be the day just ended. All the world had been open to him, and his father’s yacht to bear him to whatsoever corner thereof he might elect, in search of that which, once forfeited, no mere millions may buy back, the knack of peaceful sleep. But his wise old family physician had prescribed the tip-end of Long Island. “Go down there to that suburban wilderness, Dick,” he had said, “and devote yourself to filling your lungs with the narcotic ocean air. Practise feeding, breathing and loafing, and forget that you’ve ever practised medicine.” S Too much medicine was what ailed Dick Colton. Not that he had been taking it. On the contrary he had been administering it to others. Amid the unbounded amazement of his friends, who couldn’t see why the heir of the great Colton interests should want to devote his energies otherwhere, he had insisted on graduating from medical school, and, with a fashionable practice fairly yearning for him, had entered upon the grimy and malodorous duties of a dispensary among the tenement-folk. There, because the chances of birth had given him a good intelligence which his own efforts had kept brightened and sharpened, because Providence had equipped him with a comely and powerful body, which his own manner of life had kept attuned to strength and vigour, and because Heaven had blessed him with the heart and the face of a boy, whereof his own fineness and enthusiasm had kept the one untainted and the other defiant of care and lines, he had become a power in the slums. It was only by eternal vigilance that he had kept himself from being elected an alderman from one of the worst districts in New York. There came a week of terrible heat
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