y and mechanically, as if she was repeating a
lesson, "I am as curious as the other ladies about that pretty cabinet
of yours. Now they are all gone, won't you show the inside of it to
_me_?"

The doctor laughed in his pleasantest manner.

"The old story," he said. "Blue-Beard's locked chamber, and female
curiosity! (Don't go, Benjamin, don't go.) My dear lady, what interest
can you possibly have in looking at a medical bottle, simply because it
happens to be a bottle of poison?"

She repeated her lesson for the second time.

"I have the interest of looking at it," she said, "and of thinking, if
it got into some people's hands, of the terrible things it might do."

The doctor glanced at his assistant with a compassionate smile.

"Curious, Benjamin," he said, "the romantic view taken of these drugs of
ours by the unscientific mind! My dear lady," he added, turning to Miss
Gwilt, "if _that_ is the interest you attach to looking at poisons, you
needn't ask me to unlock my cabinet--you need only look about you round
the shelves of this room. There are all sorts of medical liquids
and substances in those bottles--most innocent, most useful in
themselves--which, in combination with other substances and other
liquids, become poisons as terrible and as deadly as any that I have in
my cabinet under lock and key."

She looked at him for a moment, and creased to the opposite side of the
room.

"Show me one," she said,

Still smiling as good-humoredly as ever, the doctor humored his nervous
patient. He pointed to the bottle from which he had privately removed
the yellow liquid on the previous day, and which he had filled up again
with a carefully-colored imitation in the shape of a mixture of his own.

"Do you see that bottle," he said--"that plump, round,
comfortable-looking bottle? Never mind the name of what is beside it;
let us stick to the bottle, and distinguish it, if you like, by giving
it a name of our own. Suppose we call it 'our Stout Friend'? Very good.
Our Stout Friend, by himself, is a most harmless and useful medicine. He
is freely dispensed every day to tens of thousands of patients all over
the civilized world. He has made no romantic appearances in courts of
law; he has excited no breathless interest in novels; he has played
no terrifying part on the stage. There he is, an innocent, inoffensive
creature, who troubles nobody with the responsibility of locking him up!
_But_ bring him into contact with so