to stop at the farmhouse till William's eyes
are fit for work again!" I almost jumped up from my chair as my thought
went on shaping itself in this manner. When great men make wonderful
discoveries, do they feel sensations like mine, I wonder? Was Sir Isaac
Newton within an ace of skipping into the air when he first found out
the law of gravitation? Did Friar Bacon long to dance when he lit the
match and heard the first charge of gunpowder in the world go off with a
bang?

I had to put a strong constraint on myself, or I should have
communicated all that was passing in my mind to William before our
friends at the farmhouse. But I knew it was best to wait until we were
alone, and I did wait. What a relief it was when we all got up at last
to say good-night!

The moment we were in our own room, I could not stop to take so much as
a pin out of my dress before I began. "My dear," said I, "I never heard
you tell that gambling-house adventure so well before. What an effect it
had upon our friends! what an effect, indeed, it always has wherever you
tell it!"

So far he did not seem to take much notice. He just nodded, and began to
pour out some of the lotion in which he always bathes his poor eyes the
last thing at night.

"And as for that, William," I went on, "all your stories seem to
interest people. What a number you have picked up, first and last,
from different sitters, in the fifteen years of your practice as a
portrait-painter! Have you any idea how many stories you really do
know?"

No: he could not undertake to say how many just then. He gave this
answer in a very indifferent tone, dabbing away all the time at his eyes
with the sponge and lotion. He did it so awkwardly and roughly, as it
seemed to me, that I took the sponge from him and applied the lotion
tenderly myself.

"Do you think," said I, "if you turned over one of your stories
carefully in your mind beforehand--say the one you told to-night,
for example--that you could repeat it all to me so perfectly and
deliberately that I should be able to take it down in writing from your
lips?"

Yes: of course he could. But why ask that question?

"Because I should like to have all the stories that you have been in the
habit of relating to our friends set down fairly in writing, by way of
preserving them from ever being forgotten."

Would I bathe his left eye now, because that felt the hottest to-night?
I began to forbode that his growing indifference to wh