e was sitting up in bed, with the neck of
his nightgown open, and an acute angle of hairy chest exposed. He had a
sheet of paper, a pencil, and a clinical thermometer upon the coverlet
in front of him.

"Deuced interesting thing, Munro," said he. "Come and look at this
temperature chart. I've been taking it every quarter of an hour since I
couldn't sleep, and it's up and down till it looks like the mountains in
the geography books. We'll have some drugs in--eh, what, Munro?--and by
Crums, we'll revolutionise all their ideas about fevers. I'll write a
pamphlet from personal experiment that will make all their books clean
out of date, and they'll have to tear them up and wrap sandwiches in
them."

He was talking in the rapid slurring way of a man who has trouble
coming. I looked at his chart, and saw that he was over 102 degrees. His
pulse rub-a-dubbed under my fingers, and his skin sent a glow into my
hand.

"Any symptoms?" I asked, sitting down on the side of his bed.

"Tongue like a nutmeg-grater," said he, thrusting it out. "Frontal
headache, renal pains, no appetite, and a mouse nibbling inside my left
elbow. That's as far as we've got at present."

"I'll tell you what it is, Cullingworth," said I. "You have a touch of
rheumatic fever, and you will have to lie by for a bit."

"Lie by be hanged!" he cried. "I've got a hundred people to see to-day.
My boy, I must be down there if I have the rattle in my throat. I didn't
build up a practice to have it ruined by a few ounces of lactic acid."

"James dear, you can easily build up another one," said his wife, in her
cooing voice. "You must do what Dr. Munro tells you."

"Well," said I, "you'll want looking after, and your practice will want
looking after, and I am quite ready to do both. But I won't take the
responsibility unless you give me your word that you will do what you
are told."

"If I'm to have any doctoring it must come from you, laddie," he said;
"for if I was to turn my toes up in the public square, there's not a man
here who would do more than sign my certificate. By Crums, they might
get the salts and oxalic acid mixed up if they came to treat me, for
there's no love lost between us. But I want to go down to the practice
all the same."

"It's out of the question. You know the sequel of this complaint. You'll
have endocarditis, embolism, thrombosis, metastatic abscesses--you know
the danger as well as I do."

He sank back into his bed laughing.