words. ' I mean to try it at once, gentlemen.'
——'Try it, Mr. Jennings; and we withdraw
from the case.' I sent down to the cellar for
a bottle of champagne; and I administered
half a tumbler-full of it to the patient with my
own hand. The two physicians took up their
hats in silence, and lelt the house."

"You had assumed a serious responsibility,"
I said. " In your place, I am afraid I should
have shrunk from it."

"In my place, Mr. Blake, you would have
remembered that Mr. Candy had taken you
into his employment, under circumstances
which made you his debtor for life. In my
place, you would have seen him sinking, hour
by hour; and you would have risked anything,
rather than let the one man on earth who had
befriended you, die before your eyes. Don't
suppose that I had no sense of the terrible
position in which I had placed myself! There were
moments when I felt all the misery of my
friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful
responsibility. If I had been a happy man, if I
had led a prosperous life, I believe I should
have sunk under the task I had imposed on
myself. But / had no happy time to look back
at, no past peace of mind to force itself into
contrast with my present anxiety and suspense
——and I held firm to my resolution through it
all. I took an interval in the middle of the
day, when my patient's condition was at its
best, for the repose I needed. For the rest of
the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life
was in danger, I never left his bedside.
Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the
delirium incidental to the fever came on. It
lasted more or less through the night; and then
intermitted, at that terrible time in the early
morning—- from two o'clock to five——when the
vital energies even of the healthiest of us are
at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers
in his human harvest most abundantly. It was
then that Death and I fought our fight over the
bed, which should have the man who lay on it.
I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on
which I had staked everything. When wine
failed, I tried brandy. When the other stimulants
lost their influence, I doubled the dose.
After an interval of suspense——the like of
which I hope to God I shall never feel again
——there came a day when the rapidity of the
pulse slightly, but appreciably, diminished; and,
better still, there came also a change in the
beat——an unmistakable change to steadiness
and strength. Then, I knew that I had saved
him; and then I own I broke down. I laid the
poor fellow's wasted hand back on the bed, and
burst out crying. An hysterical relief, Mr. Blake
——nothing more! Physiology says, and says
truly, that some men are born with female
constitutions——and I am one of them!"

He made that bitterly professional apology
for his tears, speaking quietly and unaffectedly,
as he had spoken throughout. His tone and
manner, from beginning to end, showed him to
be especially, almost morbidly, anxious not to
set himself up as an object of interest to me.

"Yon may well ask, why I have wearied you.
with all these details?" he went on. " It is
the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly
introducing to you what I have to say next.
Now you know exactly what my position was,
at the time of Mr. Candy's illness, you will
the more readily understand the sore need I
had of lightening the burden on my mind by
giving it, at intervals, some sort ol relief. I
have had the presumption to occupy my leisure,
for some years past, in writing a book,
addressed to the members of my profession——a
book on the intricate and delicate subject of
the brain and the nervous system. My work
will probably never be finished; and it will
certainly never be published. It has none the less
been the friend of many lonely hours; and it
helped me to while away the anxious time——
the time of waiting, and nothing else——at Mr.
Candy's bedside. I told you he was delirious,
I think? And I mentioned the time at which
his delirium came on?"

"Yes."

"Well, I had reached a section of my book,
at that time, which touched on this same
question of delirium. I won't trouble you at any
length with my theory on the subject——I will
confine myself to telling you only what it is
your present interest to know. It has often
occurred to me in the course of my medical
practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably
infer——in cases of delirium——that the loss of the
faculty of speaking connectedly, implies of
necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking
connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy's illness
gave me an opportunity of putting this doubt
to the test. I understand the art of writing in
shorthand; and I was able to take down the
patient's ' wanderings,' exactly as they fell from
his lips.——Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am
coming to at last?"

I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless
interest to hear more.

"At odds and ends of time," Ezra Jennings
went on, " I reproduced my shorthand notes,
in the ordinary form of writing——leaving large
spaces between the broken phrases, and even
the single words, as they had fallen
disconnectedly from Mr. Candy's lips. I then treated
the result thus obtained, on something like the
principle which one adopts in putting together
a child's ' puzzle.' It is all confusion to begin
with; but it may be all brought into order and
shape, if you can only find the right way.
Acting on this plan, I filled in the blank spaces
on the paper, with what the words or phrases
on either side of it suggested to me as the
speaker's meaning; altering over and over
again, until my additions followed naturally on
the spoken words which came before them, and
fitted naturally into the spoken words which
came after them. The result was, that I not
only occupied in this way many vacant and
anxious hours, but that I arrived at something
which was (as it seemed to me), a confirmation
of the theory that I held. In plainer
words, after putting the broken sentences