it myself."

Three little chuckles come from the front of the fire.

"There's the danger of a little medical knowledge to the layman."

"A great authority has said that every first year's student is
suffering in silent agony from four diseases," remarks the surgeon.
"One is heart disease, of course; another is cancer of the parotid. I
forget the two other."

"Where does the parotid come in?"

"Oh, it's the last wisdom tooth coming through!"

"And what would be the end of that young farmer?" asks the outsider.

"Paresis of all the muscles, ending in fits, coma, and death. It may
be a few months, it may be a year or two. He was a very strong young
man and would take some killing."

"By-the-way," says the alienist, "did I ever tell you about the first
certificate I signed? I came as near ruin then as a man could go."

"What was it, then?"

"I was in practice at the time. One morning a Mrs. Cooper called upon
me and informed me that her husband had shown signs of delusions
lately. They took the form of imagining that he had been in the army
and had distinguished himself very much. As a matter of fact he was a
lawyer and had never been out of England. Mrs. Cooper was of opinion
that if I were to call it might alarm him, so it was agreed between us
that she should send him up in the evening on some pretext to my
consulting-room, which would give me the opportunity of having a chat
with him and, if I were convinced of his insanity, of signing his
certificate. Another doctor had already signed, so that it only needed
my concurrence to have him placed under treatment. Well, Mr. Cooper
arrived in the evening about half an hour before I had expected him,
and consulted me as to some malarious symptoms from which he said that
he suffered. According to his account he had just returned from the
Abyssinian Campaign, and had been one of the first of the British
forces to enter Magdala. No delusion could possibly be more marked,
for he would talk of little else, so I filled in the papers without the
slightest hesitation. When his wife arrived, after he had left, I put
some questions to her to complete the form. 'What is his age?' I
asked. 'Fifty,' said she. 'Fifty!' I cried. 'Why, the man I examined
could not have been more than thirty! And so it came out that the real
Mr. Cooper had never called upon me at all, but that by one of those
coincidences which take a man's breath away another Cooper, who really