A Testimonial

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Title:     A Testimonial
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

For years I was a great sufferer from insomnia. At one time this dread scourge had so fastened its terrible fangs upon me that I could scarcely walk. My body became one mass of sleeplessness; I tried many remedies, but without avail, and my friends had all given me up for dead when by chance from a mere acquaintance I heard of this great cure which I would recommend to all who are afflicted as I was.

I remember with horror the tortures I used to endure in agony as I tossed to and fro on the hot pillow, going over in my fevered mind interminably the formulas of the so-called reliefs from this peerless disease. An unconscionable number of times I numbered a round of sheep over a stile. I counted up to ten, over and over again; and then up to fifteen, and then twenty, twenty-five, thirty, fifty, only to craze myself with the thought of the futility of this lunacy. I heard my dollar watch tick on the dresser, until in madness I arose and placed it on the restraining pad of a clothes-brush. I heard the clock in the next room relentlessly tell the passing hours; I heard a neighboring public clock follow it through the watches of the night. I heard my happy neighbor snore. I heard the sound of rats near by, and the creaking of floors, and the voice of the wind. I tried bathing my feet before going to bed. I tried eating a light lunch. I tried intoxicating liquors. But always I stared through the blackness of the fearful night until an eerie color tinged my window, and then the dawn came up like thunder across the bay.

It was when my spirit had become worn through my body like elbows through the sleeve of an old coat that I heard the remarkable recipe for insomnia: Think of the top of your head. That is what I was told to do. "Think of the top of your head," I said to myself with some disdain in the awful grip of the night; "now how in thunder do you think of the top of your head?"

"Do you think of your hair?" I asked, turning my eyeballs upward in their sockets. "Do you think of that lightly hidden baldness?" striving to put my mind, so to say, on the top of my head. "How the Dickens-can-you-think-of----" but a drowsy numbness pained my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethewards had sunk. And I dreamed that quite plainly, as though it were some other fellow's, I saw the top of my head.

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Testimonial

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