st my going, and his influence carried
the day.

"My dear chap," said he, "you'd knock down the chief mate, and he'd
spread you out with a handspike. You'd get tied by your thumbs to the
rigging. You'd be fed on stinking water and putrid biscuits. I've been
reading a novel about the merchant service, and I know."

When I laughed at his ideas of modern sea-going he tried another line.

"You're a bigger fool than I take you for if you go," said he. "Why,
what can it lead to? All the money you earn goes to buy a blue coat, and
daub it with lace. You think you're bound for Valparaiso, and you
find yourself at the poor-house. You've got a rare opening here, and
everything ready to your hand. You'll never get such another again."

And so it ended by my letting them have a wire to say that I could not
come. It is strange when you come to a point where the road of your life
obviously divides, and you take one turning or the other after vainly
trying to be sure about the finger-post. I think after all I chose
rightly. A ship's surgeon must remain a ship's surgeon, while here there
is no horizon to my possibilities.

As to old Cullingworth, he is booming along as merrily as ever. You say
in your last, that what you cannot understand is how he got his hold of
the public in so short a time. That is just the point which I have found
it hard to get light upon. He told me that after his first coming he had
not a patient for a month, and that he was so disheartened that he very
nearly made a moonlight exodus. At last, however, a few cases came his
way--and he made such extraordinary cures of them, or else impressed
them so by his eccentricity, that they would do nothing but talk of him.
Some of his wonderful results got into the local press, though, after
my Avonmouth experience, I should not like to guarantee that he did not
himself convey them there. He showed me an almanac, which had a great
circulation in the district.

It had an entry sandwiched in this way:

Aug. 15. Reform Bill passed 1867.

Aug. 16. Birth of Julius Caesar.

Aug. 17. Extraordinary cure by Dr. Cullingworth of a case of dropsy in
Bradfield, 1881.

Aug. 18. Battle of Gravelotte, 1870.

It reads as if it were one of the landmarks of the latter half of the
century. I asked him how on earth it got there; but I could only learn
that the woman was fifty-six inches round the waist, and that he had
treated her with elaterium.

That leads me to another poi