Was the poor brigadier killed by his own
brother? Nobody will ever know; but, if it
was by his brother, it must have been, according
to the dates, by his twin-brother.

And that was the end of both the two, as
story-books say. Was Jean Gigon's death any
great loss? What good did he ever do? He
consumed and he destroyed, but he never
produced. He planted no tree, he built no house,
he brought up no child. He neither discovered
nor communicated the least scrap of knowledge
or information, theoretical or practical. He
owed much to society; he returned nothing,
except acting as a unit in the army. His want
of self-control prevented him from attaining, or
from keeping when attained, an honourable
place in his soldierly profession. All we can
find to say for him is, that he was an effectual
scarecrow for the frightening away of flocks of
mischievous Arabs; and that, finding himself
quite in the wrong, when he need not have put
himself in the wrong at all, he refrained from
killing an unoffending fellow-creature and suffered
himself to be killed instead—which also he
need not have suffered, as a fatal duel was by no
means called for. However, this last was almost
noble conduct—if it was not delirium tremens.

FRIENDS ON ALL FOURS.

EVERY man who understands himself before
he marries, gives, or would like to give, a bit of
his heart and a place in his home to a friend on
all fours. It is well when, as a solitary being,
one sets up a house, or a room, to furnish
it with some creature who has penetration
enough to believe in one. I never took a
zoological or scientific interest in any living
companion, never studied a cat or a dog with
reference to the great question of instinct in animals,
and all pets that belong to other people I abhor.
Nevertheless, among departed friends of my
youth I reckon one cat and three dogs; among
bygone acquaintances some horses; and of these
old friends the memory is fresh, although they
died two or three dozen years ago.

When I first took out, as an apothecary, my
game license against the public, there was in
the City of London a certain preserve of game,
a district of hereditary patients, into which I and
the friend of my soul marched with our mortars.
We took up our position on a ground floor, set
the trap of a brass plate, and organised a battue
in the shape of a large party. But as we did
not upon that occasion send round mixture for
wine—at any rate it is upon the soul of the
wine-merchant and not upon our souls if we did
—and as we could charge nothing for our own
attendance or for that of our assistant the
greengrocer, we got no practice out of the
battue. Our most important patient during the
six months that followed, was an idiotic kitten.

We had in our rooms, a large theological
library and a small kitten. My friend and partner
had for brother a divine and scholar, who
was himself fixed in a rural parish, but who had
left a large part of his library in London. His
books, well pleased with the impressive air they
gave our walls, we undertook to warehouse.
We had a servant, the best creature in the
world, who was almost as idiotic as the kitten;
so idiotic that she suffered us to physic her
when she felt out of sorts. Idiocy was the
maid's only fault. She would, instead of sweeping
our rooms of a morning, make expeditions
to buy bunches of wallflowers for their decoration;
a sweet fancy suggested by her knowledge
that young masters wrote poems upon posies.

Such was the home of Moses.

Moses was the kitten. It came to us as a
professional fee. It was, indeed, the only fee
received by us, Mr. Smilt and Mr. Plog,
surgeons, in that brass-plated establishment. The
patient was the wife of a Jew in Field-lane.
She was visited at her own house, and that,
perhaps, was well; for, had she come to us she
might have been impressed to an undesirable
degree with the extent and portability of our
vaunted lines of Fathers. When convalescent,
this lady lamented her poverty, asked
my friend Plog, who occasionally noticed the
tricks of her kitten, whether he would accept
little Moses. We did not enter this receipt
in the blank penny memorandum book that
stood for ledger, but we took the kitten as
discharge in full of all demands. Named in defiance
of her sex, she was the merriest of little cats,
and had her small endearments for us both, until
the son of the third floor threw her down stairs.

The fall injured her brain, and from that hour
she was a kitten with the manners of a slug.
She ate and fattened, but knew nobody, and
cared not even for the tip of her own tail. She
never scampered, rolled, turned head over heels,
scratched our protecting hands, or lapsed into
any gesture that was kittenish. Her only movement
was a slow walk, with eyes looking always
straight before her. The sun in eclipse is not a
phenomenon to be compared for darkness with
a torpid kitten: with a kitten that will stand for
an hour, like the alligator at the Zoological
Gardens, without lifting or lowering its head.

Moses succumbed, either to her own disease
or to Plog's calomel in cream, and shortly afterwards
the partners broke up their establishment.
Plog—now the eminent Sir Philibeg Plog, into
whose hand, as he leaves her grace's chamber, I
would not advise any one to slip a kitten for
a fee—went on his own upward way. I went
up hill and down dale towards this surgery
of content, in which my Tamarinda mixes my
draughts, and in which we are robbed by our
grandchildren of lozenges and manna.

The results of independent City practice had,
of course, determined me to buy a lot of sick
from some other practitioner, giving him a few
hundred pounds for the transfer of whatever
confidence he might have inspired in the bosom
of a nucleus. The patient who is sold in a small
lot by a shifting practitioner is not worth
anything as an individual, but as a bit of a nucleus.
So I resolved to buy a nucleus when the fit
opportunity should offer, and meanwhile see
practice as assistant to an old-established surgeon.