A WOMAN in the prime of life stood near a dusty mailbox on a dusty road, looking to the distance as far as eye could see.

Her name was Belle Bender, and she was waiting for the postman’s Ford with a beating heart, for she had written to Dr. Aesop Abercrombie, that kindly old syndicated family doctor, and was expecting his answer in this week’s Gopher Corners Gopher-Herald.

The postman came, deposited the lone paper, and wheezed away in a lonesome cloud of dust. Belle ran down the wheel tracks toward her home.

She opened the paper on the back porch next to the cream separator.

With moist eyes, she read her own letter in print:

Dear Dr. Abercrombie:

My husband talks in his sleep. At first, it was only grunts and groans, but now it is all kinds of sounds, like two stations mixed up on the radio.

If he don’t talk, he snores. I love my husband, but it is driving me crazy.

Is there any way I can stop my husband from this habit?

Tired Wife

Below, Dr. Abercrombie shed his ink of mercy upon her problem:

Dear Tired Wife:

Talking in one’s sleep may be the vocalization or expression of one’s true self, to which the world has denied admittance. Do you know your husband’s inner self, his hopes, and his dreams? Have you, too, shut him out? I advise listening carefully, my dear woman, to what your husband is Striving to tell you from his subconscious. Help him along if necessary.

Ask him fond questions. Get to know his fine spirit. Once this is done, then use your womanly ingenuity to solve his problem, and your own, for you will find that when you have aided him, your own trouble will disappear. His snoring will not bother you if you just go to sleep and forget about it.

All Best Results,
Dr. Aesop Abercrombie

Now under Belle Bender’s eyes were bags as big as 40-watt bulbs, and the circles around her eyes resembled tricycle tires. Her shoulders sagged, her back caved in, and her knees creaked when she walked. After she read the letter, she clutched the paper to her breast.

“Is it true?” she whispered. “Have I failed Big Bill?”

But immediately some measure of courage and hope returned, and vowing to rectify her omissions, she went about her day’s work of plowing the east field, milking cows, slopping pigs, weeding vegetables, and preparing supper, with a lighter step. At 9 o’clock that night, when Big Bill showed up from town where he had gone to buy shoelaces, she was already in bed, wide awake and waiting for his nocturnal speech.

As before, the room was wrapped in silence for a while; then, beginning slowly, from the deep interior of Big Bill, commenced a program of rumbles, snorts, hisses, sighs, murmurings, gaspings, and a moaning not to be gainsaid. Belle lay inert and tense, her eyes on the shadowy outlines of the highboy in the corner from which hung one leg of a union suit, ghostly and white. The noise gained in momentum; isolated syllables broke through.

“Say something, Big Bill,” she whispered.

“What?” he said, as if his mouth were full of a feather pillow.

“Are you trying to tell me something, Big Bill?”

“Quit calling me Big Bill,” said the voice, and her husband began to snore.

This last remark caused Belle Bender to muse far into the night in an effort to extract from it his problem. What had his inner self been trying to tell her? Near cockcrow, she thought she had the answer.

After feeding the chickens, hitching the team, and completing her other housewifely tasks, she called Big Bill down from his bed to a fine breakfast of salt pork and sprouts.

“Morning, William,” she said.

He cracked her in the jaw. “What’s the matter with you,” he roared, “trying to get smart or something? Call me by my right name—Big Bill!”