m escaping.

"My dear Jamie," implored Mabel, while the tears started to her eyes,
"do keep quiet, do!"

The doctor and the professor now forced me back upon the sofa, and I
had once more to resign myself to my fate.

"A most singular hallucination," said the professor, turning his
round, good-natured face to the doctor. "A moment ago he observed that
I was _not_ a parrot, which necessarily must have been suggested by a
previous hallucination that I _was_ a parrot."

The doctor shook his head and looked grave.

"Possibly a very serious case," said he, "a case of ----," and he gave
it a long Latin name, which I failed to catch. "It is well that I was
called in time. We may still succeed in mastering the disease."

"Too much study?" suggested the professor. "Restless ambition? Night
labor--severe application?"

The doctor nodded and tried to look wise. Mabel burst into tears, and
I myself, seeing her distress, could hardly refrain from weeping. And
still I could not help thinking that it was very sweet to see Mabel's
tears flowing for my sake.

The doctor now sat down and wrote a number of curiously abbreviated
Latin words for a prescription, and handed it to the professor, who
folded it up and put it into his pocket-book.

Half an hour later, I lay in a soft bed with snowy-white curtains, in
a cozy little room upstairs. The shades had been pulled down before
the windows, a number of medicine bottles stood on a chair at my
bedside, and I began to feel quite like an invalid--and all because I
had said (what nobody could deny) that the professor was not a parrot.

IV.

I soon learned that the easiest way to recover my liberty was to offer
no resistance, and to say nothing more about the gnome and the
spectacles. Mabel came and sat by my bedside for a few hours every
afternoon, and her father visited me regularly three times a day,
felt my pulse and gave me a short lecture on moderation in study, on
the evil effects of ambition, and on the dangerous tendencies of
modern speculation.

The gnome's spectacles I kept hidden under my pillow, and many a time
when Mabel was with me I felt a strong temptation to try their effect
upon her. Was Mabel really as good and beautiful as she seemed to me?
Often I had my hand on the dangerous glasses, but always the same
dread came over me, and my courage failed me. That sweet, fair,
beautiful face,--what could it be, if it was not what it seemed? No,
no, I loved Mabel to