it would succeed, do you think I would hesitate?" she cried.

The utmost concession that he could obtain her consent to was that he
should first visit this Dr. Heidenhoff alone, and make some inquiries of
and about him.

CHAPTER X.

The next day he called at 79 ---- Street. There was a modest shingle
bearing the name "Dr. Gustav Heidenhoff" fastened up on the side of the
house, which was in the middle of a brick block. On announcing that he
wanted to see the doctor, he was ushered into a waiting-room, whose walls
were hung with charts of the brain and nervous system, and presently a
tall, scholarly-looking man, with a clean-shaven face, frosty hair, and
very genial blue eyes, deep set beneath extremely bushy grey eyebrows,
entered and announced himself as Dr. Heidenhoff. Henry, who could not
help being very favourably impressed by his appearance, opened the
conversation by saying that he wanted to make some inquiries about the
Thought-extirpation process in behalf of a friend who was thinking of
trying it. The doctor, who spoke English with idiomatic accuracy, though
with a slightly German accent, expressed his willingness to give him all
possible information, and answered all his questions with great apparent
candour, illustrating his explanations by references to the charts which
covered the walls of the office. He took him into an inner office and
showed his batteries, and explained that the peculiarity of his process
consisted, not in any new general laws and facts of physiology which he
had discovered, but entirely in peculiarities in his manner of applying
his galvanic current, talking much about apodes, cathodes,
catelectrotonus and anelectrotonus, resistance and rheostat, reactions,
fluctuations, and other terms of galvano-therapeutics. The doctor frankly
admitted that he was not in a way of making a great deal of money or
reputation by his discovery. It promised too much, and people
consequently thought it must be quackery, and as sufficient proof of this
he mentioned that he had now been five years engaged in practising the
Thought-extirpation process without having attained any considerable
celebrity or attracting a great number of patients. But he had a
sufficient support in other branches of medical practice, he added, and,
so long as he had patients enough for experimentation with the aim of
improving the process, he was quite satisfied.

He listened with great interest to Henry's account of Ma