udden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I
made a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart.
I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been
induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the
time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted
myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I
went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could
not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out
as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it
with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I
could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had
scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out
a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He was an old chum of mine, and feels my
pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for
nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn
by going to him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He
shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen
hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two
diseases each." So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

"Well, what's the matter with you?"

I said:

"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the
matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not
got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell
you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything, else,
however, I _have_ got."

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and
then hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it--a cowardly thing
to do, I call it--and immediately afterward butted me with the side of
his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and
folded it up and gave it to me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in.
The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn't keep it.

I said:

"You are a chemist?"

"I am a chemist. If I were a co-operative store and family hotel
combined, I might