strong;" and I can call to mind that my
mother had a maid once, with whom she had
a "difficulty," and who, in the progress of
the discussion, threw out the axiomatic
insult, that I was a "hobject." It had never
struck me before that I was an object; but I
have no doubt that the lady's maid was
substantially correct, Yet for all my
objectibility it seems to me that I ate and
slept, and enjoyed myself, on the whole,
pretty much as other children do—that
I was seldom conscious of my imperfect
and wretched state; and I can understand
and appreciate now that infinite mercy which,
shutting one door, opens another; which
strews the road to death with lotus leaves
and masks the destroyer's battery; which gives
cheerfulness to the consumptive, and the one
good day among many days of pain and suffering
to the condemned to disease; which
gilds the lips of the dying child with a
smile that is as the smile of angels.

The many doctors that I have been to! the
greatest having been the famous Sir Hygey
Febrifuge. He lived in Celsus Row, which is
a funereal thoroughfare leading from Upper
Tomb Street into Cenotaph Square, out of a
little masked alley called Incremation Passage.
The houses in Celsus Row are tall and
gloomy. The odour of quinquina, highly-dried
sarsaparilla, and bitter aloes, seems to float
about in the atmosphere. The gaunt iron
railings before the houses look like the staves
of mutes divested of their crape. At the
corner leading into Upper Tomb Street is
Memento House, the town mansion of the
Earl of Moriarty. Celsus Row itself is
almost exclusively occupied by the Faculty.
There have been but two laymen renting
houses in it during the last thirty years:
the Lord of Moriarty, who resides abroad,
and one Colonel Platterbattel, of the Nizam's
army, who, as a punishment for his
intrusion into the sacred precincts of Esculapius,
was signally sold up lately, and
had carpets hanging out of his windows,
and auctioneers' placards pasted on his
walls. The brass-plates as you advance
upwards towards Incremation Passage
are as brazen pages of the Medical
Directory. Sir Hygey Febrifuge, Sir Esculap
Bistoury, Scalpel Carver, Esq., M.D.,
F.R.C.S., F.R.S.; Doctor Drugg; Doctor
Pelvill; Mr. Drum (the famous aurist);
Mr. Bucephalon (the world-widely known
oculist); Sir Ackwer Distillat; and others,
have all their lodgments here. Grave
broughams, or graver carriages and pair,
driven by sedate coachmen—well read, no
doubt, in the London Pharmacopœia, and
putting their horses through regular courses
of medicine—draw up, towards visiting hours,
in Celsus Row. Footmen clad in solemn
black, or—even if in undress—wearing sober
black and white striped jackets, open and
shut the tall doors noiselessly. Visitors come
and go noiselessly, and give cautious double
raps. Swathed and muffled figures emerge
from cabs, and totter feebly into the houses,
Cabmen forbear to slang, and butcher-
boys to whistle, in Celsus Row. You
hear in fancy the scratching of pens writing
prescriptions, the clinking of the guinea
fee into the physician's hand, the beating of
the pulse, the long-drawn sigh, the half-suppressed
groan as the patient waits agonisingly
for a verdict of life or death from the
doctor's lips.

For here in Celsus Row, in the tall quiet
houses, dwell the locksmiths of the gate of
ivory and the gate of horn. They cannot
always find a key to fit; it often happens
that the lock is so inscrutably constructed
as to defy all their keys and baffle all
their skill. But what it is within the
compass of human capacity to know, thus
much know the doctors of Celsus Row.
They have the bunch of keys at their girdles:
the key of pain and the key of solace, the
key of sleep and the key of exhilaration;
the key that gives strength to weakness,
soundness to disease, cheerfulness to misery.
From nine to twelve daily, crowds pour
through the gates, paying their guinea toll,
but finding often and often that the ivory
gate only admits them to a life that is false,
and that through the gate of horn lies Truth
and Death.

My recollections of Sir Hygey Febrifuge
are of a little gray-headed man who was
always in a hurry. He is still alive, I am
happy to say,—little, gray-headed, and as
constantly in a hurry. A man has a right to
be in a hurry whose time is worth a guinea
a minute. He must be immensely aged by
this time, and must have earned an immense
number of guineas. Well can I remember the
solemn, silent dining-room in which I used to
wait for audience with Sir Hygey Febrifuge.
There were two large dusky pictures in it,
the one representing the knight in his
academical robes; the other a huge fruit and
flower-piece, with a lobster, half-a-dozen
oysters, a lemon with a long trailing rind,
a flask of wine, and a profusion of luscious
pineapples, cherries, grapes, roses, and
vine-leaves. I used to look upon these two latter
pictures with a sort of vengeful feeling,
remembering how many delicacies had been
forbidden to me through the instrumentality
of the Faculty. There was a massive sideboard;
beneath which there was a metallic
monument, dreadfully like a sepulchral urn,
which I now know to have been a wine-
cooler, but which, in those days, I firmly
believed to contain the ashes of dead patients.
I can see now the dingy red drugget on the
floor, the green-baize covered tables set
out with bygone annuals, defunct
court-guides, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,
Lord Kaimes on Criticism, and an odd
volume of the Annual Register; the faded
morocco chairs; the double, crimson-
covered, brass-nailed door, that led into the