re let me have the run of his library. Gibbon gave me a couple of
enchanting weeks. You know the effect that he produces. You seem to
be serenely floating upon a cloud, and looking down on all these pigmy
armies and navies, with a wise Mentor ever at your side to whisper to
you the inner meaning of all that majestic panorama.

Now and again young Derwent introduced some excitement into my dull
life. On one occasion when we were walking in the grounds, he suddenly
snatched up a spade from a grass-plot, and rushed at an inoffensive
under-gardener. The man ran screaming for his life, with my patient
cursing at his very heels, and me within a few paces of him. When I at
last laid my hand on his collar, he threw down his weapon and burst into
shrieks of laughter. It was only mischief and not ferocity; but when
that under-gardener saw us coming after that he was off with a face like
a cream cheese. At night the attendant slept in a camp-bed at the foot
of the patient's, and my room was next door, so that I could be called
if necessary. No, it was not a very exhilarating life!

We used to go down to family meals when there were no visitors; and
there we made a curious quartette: Jimmy (as he wished me to call him)
glum and silent; I with the tail of my eye always twisted round to him;
Lady Saltire with her condescending eyelids and her blue veins; and the
good-natured peer, fussy and genial, but always rather subdued in the
presence of his wife. She looked as if a glass of good wine would do
her good, and he as if he would be the better for abstinence; and so, in
accordance with the usual lopsidedness of life, he drank freely, and
she took nothing but lime-juice and water. You cannot imagine a more
ignorant, intolerant, narrow-minded woman than she. If she had only been
content to be silent and hidden that small brain of hers, it would
not have mattered; but there was no end to her bitter and exasperating
clacking. What was she after all but a thin pipe for conveying disease
from one generation to another? She was bounded by insanity upon the
north and upon the south. I resolutely set myself to avoid all argument
with her; but she knew, with her woman's instinct, that we were as far
apart as the poles, and took a pleasure in waving the red flag before
me. One day she was waxing eloquent as to the crime of a minister of an
Episcopal church performing any service in a Presbyterian chapel. Some
neighbouring minister had done it,