In "A Day's Wait," while poor little Schatz lies in bed suffering from a nasty bout of the flu, his father reads to him from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates. This his father's way of taking Schatz's mind off being ill.

Unfortunately, it does no such thing, for as Schatz's father ruefully reflects, his son seems very detached from everything that's going on around him. When the father reads aloud from the book, it's noticeable that Schatz isn't paying attention and that he's not following what his father is reading.

And no wonder; the boy thinks he's dying. He isn't really dying, of course, but due to a miscommunication between father and son, Schatz has got it into his head that he's at death's door. That being the case, it's perfectly understandable that Schatz's mind should be elsewhere and that he's unable to pay much attention to anything, least of all his father reading to him.

When Schatz's father returns to his son's bedroom later on in the story, he tries to read from the book again, and once more his son isn't paying attention. Schatz's father is shocked to discover that his son is expecting to die at any moment because his temperature is 102 degrees, and the boys at school told him that no one can survive with a temperature of over 44 degrees. But as Schatz's father points out, those are different units of temperature. Schatz has mixed up Celsius with Fahrenheit.