ined, on something like the principle which one adopts in
putting together a child's 'puzzle.' It is all confusion to begin with;
but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find
the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the
paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested
to me as the speaker's meaning; altering over and over again, until my
additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them,
and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The
result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious
hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a
confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting
the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking
going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient's mind, while the
inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete
incapacity and confusion."

"One word!" I interposed eagerly. "Did my name occur in any of his
wanderings?"

"You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion
which I have just advanced--or, I ought to say, among the written
experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof--there IS one, in
which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candy's
mind was occupied with SOMETHING between himself and you. I have got the
broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet of paper. And
I have got the links of my own discovering which connect those words
together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the arithmeticians
would say) is an intelligible statement--first, of something actually
done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr. Candy contemplated
doing in the future, if his illness had not got in the way, and stopped
him. The question is whether this does, or does not, represent the lost
recollection which he vainly attempted to find when you called on him
this morning?"

"Not a doubt of it!" I answered. "Let us go back directly, and look at
the papers!"

"Quite impossible, Mr. Blake."

"Why?"

"Put yourself in my position for a moment," said Ezra Jennings. "Would
you disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from the
lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without first
knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your lips?"

I felt that he was unans