direction over my person by a rapid and practised hand, recollecting nothing more previous to awakening in my own bed on a cold morning, and lying watching the fire in the grate and wondering where I was.

This turned out to be after all only a state of semi-consciousness, a kind of lull in the storm of physical suffering. The injuries from bruises, and especially from that terrible constriction of the neck to which I had been subjected, were very great.

Then, slowly, slowly, came on the insidious approaches of another disorder, unquiet restlessness of body, thrills of cold and oppression of dry heat, then a strange disconnexion of ideas, which at first amused me like some new game as I lay dozing, my thoughts wandering from one subject to another, as if each half of the brain was pursuing its own separate course, and two trains of thought were intermixed. But the commencement of one series of ideas merged into the end of another series, and the end of the first became tangled with the beginning of the last, producing inextricable confusion, which first amused and then oppressed and confused the mind.

My hold upon the reins became consciously less and less firm, the steeds increased their headlong pace, the road grew more rocky and the declivities steeper and more dangerous. Facilis decensus averni! Thus was I delivered gradually over to the drear keeping of fever and delirium.

The opiates given to afford some little ease began

to develope their wonderful effects, and to lead me away in a thousand visions wild and strange, ever containing some subtle connexion with the pain that racked me; parched with thirst and throbbing with heat I seemed to cleave the tides which hissed around my fiery sides in the form of some huge sea monster, making my way through oceans of dark green water deep down to dim mysterious semi-darkness, lighted here and there with phosphorescent gleams, peopled with things nameless, formless, horrescent; or plunging amidst groups of pale corpses swaying with the undercurrents amidst the fearful foliage of unfathomable deeps, or struggling in the grasp of some leviathan stronger that myself whose serrated teeth compressed my throat and finally held me powerless.

Or, clasped by some giant hand whose great pulsations vibrated through my being, I hung suspended from some tremendous height, and saw the birds wheel eddying below, and marked the mountain ridges and the rocks sharp with black pinnacles and rifted splinters waiting to transfix me in my downward course. So swift was the descent that the rushing air stung my face and form at first like icicles, then burnt with Polar rigour, and the giant thumb and finger like a vice still held me, tighter, tighter yet, till only a few feet from death by a thousand jagged wounds, the terrible death of suffocation changed my fate.

Then, as the subtler influences of the drug permeated soul and sense, a change came over all these visions, a vastness and amplification of them inde

scribable, a feeling akin to that which takes possession of the awe-struck imagination when it pores over the Law of Bode, thinks upon the immensity of the solar system, sees through its walls of stars to countless other systems, resolves its light clouds of floating nebulo on the extremest verge of sight, into yet grander and wider creations, and with all this there was a power of constant ceaseless change, of sudden radiation to the infinite, of instant contraction into one burning wheel of fire, which ever played on amidst time and chaos, now lighting up some cavern in the centre of the earth round which eternal weight crushed down on every side, now sending forth planets for sparks, and embracing in its magnetic circle the unknown confines of the universe.

The doctor was very kind and attentive, frequent were the visits that he paid, carefully did he see that all his injunctions were complied with. But he caused me no little impatience by his refusal to enter into any particulars of my conveyance home, or of the attack itself, or the enquiries made concerning it. There would be plenty of time for all that, he said, when I was out of danger, he counselled perfect quiet, and absence of thought, as if that were possible—and even when returning strength seemed to render it unnecessary to delay further, he would sit and talk of anything rather than personal affairs. The nearest approach I

made to them was in a discussion on the value of certain incomplete evidence, in which the exertion of conversation brought on considerable excitement,

and to quiet me and draw my thoughts away into another channel, the excellent man related me the following strange history of actual facts which had become known to him in the course of his own practice, and for the truth of which he distinctly vouched. They form a suggestive additional chapter to the many which the world has seen regarding circumstantial evidence.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PHYSICIAN'S STORY.

"There is nothing wonderful in the world but vice."

ANTISTHENES.

It was at the time that I lived in Cheshire, at the little village of Scaur (said the doctor), that this remarkable event happened. I had been to see Mrs. Jenkins, who was very unwell with bronchitis. She was the landlady of the Golden Eagle, the only inn of any consequence at Scaur. Having nothing particular to do, I stopped chatting with the host more than an hour, and had some brandy and water, for it was dark and rainy. I remember after that we stood in the porch for some time looking out into the night, and my lad coming to say I was wanted at Market-Sloughboro, I told him to bring my horse round there for me. John, the ostler, was talking to some people who were in the kitchen. One man, who had just come in and was having a cup of beer, sat far back in the chimney corner,