ose which I entertain as I write. I have grown older, and, I hope,
something kindlier and wiser since then. Yet to this day I cannot blame
myself for abandoning my chambers and avoiding my club.

For a temporary asylum I pitched upon a small, quiet, empty, private
hotel which I knew of in Charterhouse Square. Instantly the room next
mine became occupied.

All the first night I imagined I heard voices talking about me in that
room next door. It was becoming a disease with me. Either I was being
dogged, watched, followed, day and night, indoors and out, or I was the
victim of a very ominous hallucination. That night I never closed an eye
nor lowered my light. In the morning I took a four-wheel cab and
drove straight to Harley Street; and, upon my soul, as I stood on the
specialist's door-step, I could have sworn I saw the occupant of the
room next mine dash by me in a hansom!

"Ah!" said the specialist; "so you cannot sleep; you hear voices;
you fancy you are being followed in the street. You don't think these
fancies spring entirely from the imagination? Not entirely--just so. And
you keep looking behind you, as though somebody were at your elbow; and
you prefer to sit with your back close to the wall. Just so--just so.
Distressing symptoms, to be sure, but--but hardly to be wondered at in a
man who has come through your nervous strain." A keen professional light
glittered in his eyes. "And almost commonplace," he added, smiling,
"compared with the hallucinations you must have suffered from on that
hen-coop! Ah, my dear sir, the psychological interest of your case is
very great!"

"It may be," said I, brusquely. "But I come to you to get that hen-coop
out of my head, not to be reminded of it. Everybody asks me about the
damned thing, and you follow everybody else. I wish it and I were at the
bottom of the sea together!"

This speech had the effect of really interesting the doctor in my
present condition, which was indeed one of chronic irritation and
extreme excitability, alternating with fits of the very blackest
despair. Instead of offending my gentleman I had put him on his mettle,
and for half an hour he honored me with the most exhaustive inquisition
ever elicited from a medical man. His panacea was somewhat in the nature
of an anti-climax, but at least it had the merits of simplicity and
of common sense. A change of air--perfect quiet--say a cottage in the
country--not too near the sea. And he shook my hand ki