retired behind his screen. Scarcely able to contain
my delight at having at last been successful, I curbed my impatience as
well as I could, examined all the articles displayed in the glass case
upon the counter, fidgeted nervously with the india-rubber change mat,
and when, at the end of several minutes, he had not made it up, was only
prevented from going in search of him by his appearance before me once
more.

"I am exceedingly sorry to say," he began, and directly he opened his
mouth I knew that some fresh misfortune was in store for me, "that I can
not make up the prescription for you at all. Of one of the drugs I
remember once reading, but of the other I have never even heard.
However, if----"

But before he could utter another word I had seized the paper and was
out of the shop. This was the second time I had been fooled, and upward
of half an hour, thirty precious minutes, had been wasted. Even then
Valerie might be dying, and I was powerless to save her. Never in my
life before had time seemed so precious. I stopped a passer-by and
inquired the direction of the nearest chemist. He referred me to the
shop I had just left; I stopped another, but he confessed himself a
stranger in the city. At last, at my wit's end to know what to do,
finding myself before the office of the steamship company I had visited
that afternoon, I determined to go inside and make inquiries.

To my surprise, in place of the half dozen clerks who had stared at me
only a few hours before, I found but one man, and before he had opened
his lips I realized that he was drunk.

"Ha, ha!" he said, with a burst of tipsy laughter, "so you have come
back again, my friend? Want to get a boat to take you to England, I
suppose. Oh, of course you do. We know all about that. We're not as
blind, I mean as blind drunk, as you suppose."

With that he lurched against the desk, and cannoned off it on to me.
Then, having reached that stage of inebriation when music becomes a
necessity, he leant against the wall and burst into song:--

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine,
Or leave a kiss within....

He had got no farther when I took him by the collar, and pushing him
back against the wall, bumped his head against it until it is a wonder I
did not fracture his skull.

"Hold your tongue, you drunken fool!" I said, feeling as if I could kill
him where he stood, "and tell me where the man is who attended to me
this af