g on the bed, he held
forth about his plans while I dressed.

"I tell you one of the first things I mean to do, Munro," said he. "I
mean to have a paper of my own. We'll start a weekly paper here, you and
I, and we'll make them sit up all round. We'll have an organ of our own,
just like every French politician. If any one crosses us, we'll make
them wish they had never been born. Eh, what, laddie? what d'you think?
So clever, Munro, that everybody's bound to read it, and so scathing
that it will just fetch out blisters every time. Don't you think we
could?"

"What politics?" I asked.

"Oh, curse the politics! Red pepper well rubbed in, that's my idea of a
paper. Call it the Scorpion. Chaff the Mayor and the Council until they
call a meeting and hang themselves. I'd do the snappy paragraphs, and
you would do the fiction and poetry. I thought about it during the
night, and Hetty has written to Murdoch's to get an estimate for the
printing. We might get our first number out this day week."

"My dear chap!" I gasped.

"I want you to start a novel this morning. You won't get many patients
at first, and you'll have lots of time."

"But I never wrote a line in my life."

"A properly balanced man can do anything he sets his hand to. He's
got every possible quality inside him, and all he wants is the will to
develop it."

"Could you write a novel yourself?" I asked.

"Of course I could. Such a novel, Munro, that when they'd read the first
chapter the folk would just sit groaning until the second came out.
They'd wait in rows outside my door in the hope of hearing what was
coming next. By Crums, I'll go and begin it now!" And, with another
somersault over the end of the bed, he rushed from the room, with the
tassels of his dressing gown flying behind him.

I daresay you've quite come to the conclusion by this time that
Cullingworth is simply an interesting pathological study--a man in the
first stage of lunacy or general paralysis. You might not be so sure
about it if you were in close contact with him. He justifies his wildest
flights by what he does. It sounds grotesque when put down in black and
white; but then it would have sounded equally grotesque a year ago if he
had said that he would build up a huge practice in a twelvemonth. Now we
see that he has done it. His possibilities are immense. He has such
huge energy at the back of his fertility of invention. I am afraid, on
thinking over all that I have written t