liged to go away and stay with a neighbor to avoid hearing him;
his cries were terrible; he tried to kill himself; his daughter was
obliged to have him put into a strait-jacket and fastened to his bed.
The poor man declares there are live animals in his head gnawing his
brain; every nerve quivers with horrible shooting pains, and he writhes
in torture. He suffers so much in his head that he did not even feel the
moxas they used formerly to apply to relieve it; but Monsieur Brousson,
who is now his physician, has forbidden that remedy, declaring that the
trouble is a nervous affection, an inflammation of the nerves, for
which leeches should be applied to the neck, and opium to the head. As a
result, the attacks are not so frequent; they appear now only about once
a year, and always late in the autumn. When he recovers, Taillefer says
repeatedly that he would far rather die than endure such torture."

"Then he must suffer terribly!" said a broker, considered a wit, who was
present.

"Oh," continued the mistress of the house, "last year he nearly died in
one of these attacks. He had gone alone to his country-house on pressing
business. For want, perhaps, of immediate help, he lay twenty-two hours
stiff and stark as though he were dead. A very hot bath was all that
saved him."

"It must be a species of lockjaw," said one of the guests.

"I don't know," she answered. "He got the disease in the army nearly
thirty years ago. He says it was caused by a splinter of wood entering
his head from a shot on board a boat. Brousson hopes to cure him. They
say the English have discovered a mode of treating the disease with
prussic acid--"

At that instant a still more piercing cry echoed through the house, and
froze us with horror.

"There! that is what I listened to all day long last year," said
the banker's wife. "It made me jump in my chair and rasped my nerves
dreadfully. But, strange to say, poor Taillefer, though he suffers
untold agony, is in no danger of dying. He eats and drinks as well as
ever during even short cessations of the pain--nature is so queer!
A German doctor told him it was a form of gout in the head, and that
agrees with Brousson's opinion."

I left the group around the mistress of the house and went away. On
the staircase I met Mademoiselle Taillefer, whom a footman had come to
fetch.

"Oh!" she said to me, weeping, "what has my poor father ever done to
deserve such suffering?--so kind as he is!"

I a