and stretch
yourself on this chair. Call me when you're ready."

Schulze withdrew into what smelled like a laboratory. Hiram could hear
him rattling glass against glass and metal, could smell the fumes of
uncorked bottles of acids. When he called, Schulze reappeared, disposed
instruments and tubes upon a table. "I never ask my patients questions,"
he said, as he began to examine Hiram's chest. "I lay 'em out here and go
over 'em inch by inch. I find all the weak spots, both those that are
crying out and those worse ones that don't. I never ask a man what's the
matter; I tell him. And my patients, and all the fools in this town,
think I'm in league with the devil. A doctor who finds out what's the
matter with a man Providence is trying to lay in the grave--what can it
be but the devil?"

He had reached his subject; as he worked he talked it--religion, its
folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram
listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He
knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmanship. As the
physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel
better--not physically better, but that mental relief which a courageous
man feels when the peril he is facing is stripped of the mystery that
made it a terror. After perhaps three quarters of an hour, Schulze
withdrew to the laboratory, saying: "That's all. You may dress."

Hiram dressed, seated himself. By chance he was opposite a huge image
from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic
sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances
to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself
writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with
fascinated repulsion--the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike.
Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the
eccentric physician's--his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his
ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X.

"There!" said Schulze, looking up. "That's the best I can do for you."

"What's the matter with me?"

"You wouldn't know if I told you."

"Is it serious?"

"In this world everything is serious--and nothing."

"Will I die?"

Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had
been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the
shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and