inesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh,
the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul. One
day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements over
two continents, sat with the little great doctor in his consulting-room.
The author, with dry, white lips, had been recounting a series of sordid
symptoms, and, as the recital grew, their sordidness seemed suddenly to
strike him with a mighty disgust.

"Ah, doctor," he said. "And do you know there are people thousands of
miles away from Harley Street who actually admire me, who are stirred
and moved by what I write, who make a cult and a hero of me. They say I
have soul, forsooth. But I am all body; you know that. You doctors know
that it is only body that we put on paper, body that lifts us high, or
drags us low. Why, my best romances come straight from my liver. My
pathos springs from its condition of disorder, and my imaginative force
is only due to an unnatural state of body which I can deliberately
produce by drinking tea that has stood a long while and become full of
tannin. When my prose glows with fiery beauty, the tea is getting well
hold of my digestive organs, and by the time it has begun to prove its
power by giving me a violent pain in the stomach, I have wrung from it
a fine scene which will help to consolidate my fame. When a man wins
the Victoria Cross, his healthy body has done the deed, unprompted by
anything higher. Good air, or a muscular life, has strung his nerves
strongly so that he can't, even if he would, appreciate danger. On the
other hand, when a man shows funk, turns tail and bolts, and is dubbed a
coward, it's his beastly body again. Some obscure physical misfortune is
the cause of his disgrace, and if he'd only been to you he would have won
the Cross too. Isn't it so? How you doctors must laugh at mystics, and at
those who are ascetics, save for sake of their health. Why, I suppose
even the saint owes his so-called goodness to some analyzable proceeding
that has gone on in his inside, and that you could diagnose. Eh?"

Doctor Levillier was writing a prescription in which bismuth was an item.
He glanced up quietly.

"The more I know of the body, the more I think of and believe in the
power of the soul," he said. "Have that made up. Take it three times a
day and come to me again in a fortnight. Good-morning."

Indeed, this little man was writing prescriptions for the body and