perfectly rational. It showed that he
had investigated one of the obscurest, most awful psychic problems, the
sickness of men who are haunted by their doubles. He jotted down a note:

"The mirror has made man out of the animal. Without the mirror, no I and
no you. Without an I and a you, no thought. All fundamental concepts are
twins, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, hard and soft, sorrow and joy,
hate and love, cowardice and courage, jest and earnest, and so on."

The image in the mirror said to Frederick:

"You have divided yourself into you and me before you could distinguish
the separate characteristics of your being, which acts only as a whole.
That is, you divided yourself before you could divide yourself. Until
you saw yourself in a mirror, you saw nothing of the world."

"It is good to be alone with my image in the mirror," thought Frederick.
"I don't need all those distressing concave and convex mirrors which
other people are. This condition in which I am is the original condition,
and in the original condition one escapes the distortion to which other
people's words and glances subject one. The best thing is to be silent or
to speak with oneself, that is, with oneself in the mirror."

Frederick kept this up until one evening, when he was returning from a
walk in the neighbourhood, he opened the door of his room and saw himself
sitting at his desk. He stood still and rubbed his eyes, but the man
continued to sit there, though Frederick tried to drive him away with a
sharp look as a ray of light dispels a cloud of fog. He was filled with
horror, and at the same time a wave of hate swept over him.

"You or I!" he cried, quickly grasping his revolver and holding it to the
face of his double. Hate confronted hate. It was not twin love and hate,
each confronting the other.

The mirror had been an illusion.

XXVIII

Peter Schmidt had a serious operation to perform for a fibroid tumour.
Knowing that Frederick had witnessed Kocher perform the same operation in
Berne and had repeatedly been successful with it himself, he called upon
him for help. The patient was a native Yankee farmer, forty-five years of
age. His son, a lad of nineteen, drove out in a sleigh to fetch
Frederick.

At the appointed time Frederick entered the office, very pale, but
outwardly calm. Nobody suspected what a tremendous amount of will power
he had to summon to keep his self-control. Like a boy saying his A B C's,
he kept re