plained to me
learnedly, and with copious illustrations from anatomical plates, his
theory of this disease, which was his favourite one for treatment,
because it yielded rapidly. Paralysis and that class of disease are much
slower. He had succeeded in acute rheumatism, and also in calculus. "I
like fat men--fighting men to heal," he said. "I leave the delicate ones
to others." The sturdy little psychopathist looked healthy enough to
heal a sick rhinoceros.

While he was lecturing me his hands were not idle. I should think they
seldom were. He was pouring salad oil from a flask on to flannel to give
to the other man who was sitting at the table, and had approached
convalescence from a chronic disease after one or two visits, and who
used this oiled flannel to keep up the influence. Both the men seemed
perfectly genuine; and the rheumatic gentleman, when he left, pronounced
the effect of his psychopathizing miraculous. The fee was five
shillings. "I shan't charge you nothin' for the flannel," he said to No.
2. I began to take quite a fancy to Joseph Ashman, and thanked _Figaro_
inwardly for directing me to the institution.

A working woman who was next in the little row of patients assembled in
the back room, came in with her wrists bound up in bits of flannel, and
her hands looking puffed and glazy. She, too, had lost the use of them
for six years, she told me, and had been pronounced incurable by the
doctors. This was her fourth visit to Mr. Ashman. "Take up the chair,
ma'am," he said to his patient; and she did carry it in rather a wobbly
fashion across the room. "Now the other hand," and she did it with the
other hand. "Now show the gentleman how you did it when you came to me.
She's rather hard o' hearin'," he explained to me; but after one or two
repetitions the poor old body comprehended, and carried it in her
crooked elbow. "Now I'll call my assistant," he said, and summoned a
ruddy, red-bearded man, who looked as though he might have just come in
from a brisk country walk. "When these cases require a good deal of
rubbing I let my assistants do the preliminary work, and then come in as
the Healing Medium myself." The rubbers, he informed me, like the
Medium, must be qualified, not only physically, but morally. Benevolence
was the great requisite; and certainly both these men seemed running
over with it, if looks meant anything. When Joseph Ashman took his turn,
working the poor old patient's stiff wrists, and pul