yspeptic, and that had he not been one he would doubtless never have
written the "Pilgrim's Progress."

I took issue with the doctor on this point; whereupon he cited those
visions and dreams, which, according to the light of science as it now
shines, demonstrate that Bunyan's digestion must have been morbid.
And, forthwith, he overwhelmed me with learned instances from Galen and
Hippocrates, from Spurzheim and Binns, from Locke and Beattie, from
Malebranche and Bertholini, from Darwin and Descartes, from Charlevoix
and Berkeley, from Heraclitus and Blumenbach, from Priestley and
Abercrombie; in fact, forsooth, he quoted me so many authorities that
it verily seemed to me as though the whole world were against me!

I did not know until then that Dr. O'Rell had made a special study of
dreams, of their causes and of their signification. I had always
supposed that astrology was his particular hobby, in which science I
will concede him to be deeply learned, even though he has never yet
proved to my entire satisfaction that the reason why my copy of
Justinian has faded from a royal purple to a pale blue is, first,
because the binding was renewed at the wane of the moon and when Sirius
was in the ascendant, and, secondly, because (as Dr. O'Rell has
discovered) my binder was born at a moment fifty-six years ago when
Mercury was in the fourth house and Herschel and Saturn were aspected
in conjunction, with Sol at his northern declination.

Dr. O'Rell has frequently expressed surprise that I have never wearied
of and drifted away from the book-friendships of my earlier years.
Other people, he says, find, as time elapses, that they no longer
discover those charms in certain books which attracted them so
powerfully in youth. "We have in our earlier days," argues the doctor,
"friendships so dear to us that we would repel with horror the
suggestion that we could ever become heedless or forgetful of them;
yet, alas, as we grow older we gradually become indifferent to these
first friends, and we are weaned from them by other friendships; there
even comes a time when we actually wonder how it were possible for us
to be on terms of intimacy with such or such a person. We grow away
from people, and in like manner and for similar reasons we grow away
from books."

Is it indeed possible for one to become indifferent to an object he has
once loved? I can hardly believe so. At least it is not so with me,
and, even though the time m