st," he said modestly.

"Heaven knows what we should do without you."

"Oh! we're not so indispensable as all that," said the hypnotist,
ruminating the flavour of the jelly. "The world did very well without us
for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even--not one! In
practice, that is. Physicians by the thousand, of course--frightfully
clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like
sheep--but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there
were none."

He concentrated his mind on the jelly.

"But were people so sane--?" began Mwres.

The hypnotist shook his head. "It didn't matter then if they were a bit
silly or faddy. Life was so easy-going then. No competition worth
speaking of--no pressure. A human being had to be very lopsided before
anything happened. Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they
called a lunatic asylum."

"I know," said Mwres. "In these confounded historical romances that
every one is listening to, they always rescue a beautiful girl from an
asylum or something of the sort. I don't know if you attend to that
rubbish."

"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of
oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the
nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good
swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their
smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and
their horse vehicles. I suppose you don't read books?"

"Dear, no!" said Mwres, "I went to a modern school and we had none of
that old-fashioned nonsense. Phonographs are good enough for me."

"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for
his next choice. "You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue
confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely
thought of. I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred
years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing
things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and
overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means
of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few
people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order
to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after
the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told
them the thing was as