Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 14

​I sat in a room surrounded by all my friends. My blood coursed hotly through my veins, my heart was filled with restlessness, and I found a difficulty in breathing. I jumped up and paced up and down the floor.

"What is the matter with you?" cried my friends.

"It is so gloomy in here, and the air seems close."

At this my friends started, and they all sat dumbly and gazed at me with staring eyes.

"That is just an idea you have got into your head," said he who had bartered his own eyes for an office desk, "or why should we others not have noticed it?"

"Don't you see how the sun shines; let us open all the windows and the door."

"It is bound to give us the snuffles," said the joker of the party, and he crept into the corner near the fire, where he soon began to snore.

​"Our room is just as good as any other," spouted he who was always obliged to spout since he lost his natural voice one day in a slough.

"Will it benefit us, or will it do you any good?" hissed he who sold his conviction for threepenny bits with the idea that they were gold coins, and who felt a sore prick of conscience whenever he caught sight of an original opinion.

"Pull down the blinds and then you won't see the sun," whispered he who never ventured to speak aloud since the day he got a kick from his master because he had said that his dog had long ears.

"You only need to quit our close and stuffy room, and us, and the whole show, and betake yourself to the wilderness," jeered he who shuffled about on a club-foot as if he had a ball attached to his leg.

"You have said the word," I cried, and my face lit the room as with sunshine.

Then all my friends sprang up from their seats, and the one-eyed one glared with his ​one eye, and he who snored gaped wide awake and looked stupid, and the spouter elevated his hand pathetically, and the lips of the jaundiced member trembled as if the words he wished to utter were so distended with bile that they could not find a way out, and the whisperer looked as if he were praying, and the club-footed one got cramps.

I rushed to the door, and they all screamed with one accord "Bear in mind, if you have once closed the door behind you, you will never get in again!"

I halted at the threshold, turned round and looked at my friends, and I failed to recognise them, it was as if I had never seen them before. They were dogs from whom I had snatched a bone, cardsharpers whose false play I had exposed, wild animals cheated of their prey, slaves that I had whipped, but they were not those whom I had formerly dubbed my friends. And the room—a wild beast's lair, a madhouse, a viper's nest, a goat pen, anything, what you please, only not my old room.

And I wrenched open the door and slammed ​it to in haste, and the windows were filled with faces; but as for me, I wandered forth glad in my loneness, through the May breeze kissing the May flowers.