I refilled his glass, and closed my eyes once more. In my old pharmaceutical experiences I had often made bread pills, and remembered well how, almost invariably, they had been deemed successful. What relief from pain to the agonized sufferer had they not given! What slumber to the sleepless! What appetite, what vigor, what excitement! Why should not the same treatment apply to morals as to medicine? Why, with faith to aid one, cannot he induce every wished-for mood of mind and thought? The lay figure to support the drapery suffices for the artist, the Venus herself is in his brain. Now, if that little fellow there would neither cut capers nor speak, I ask no more of him. Let him sit firmly as he does now, staring me boldly in the face that way. “Yes,” said I, “lay your hand on the arm of your chair, so, and let the other be clenched thus.” And so I placed him. “Never utter a word, but nod to me at rare intervals.” He has since acknowledged that he believed me to be deranged; but as I seemed a harmless case, and he could rely on his activity for escape, he made no objection to my directions, the less, too, that he enjoyed his wine immensely, and was at liberty to drink as he pleased. “Now,” thought I, “one glance, only one, to see that he poses properly.” All right; nothing could be better. His face was turned slightly to one side, giving what the painters call action to the head, and he was perfect I now resigned myself to the working of the spell, and already I felt its influence over me. Where and with what was I to begin? Numberless questions thronged to my mind. I wanted to know a thousand disputed things, and fully as many that were only disputed by myself. I felt that as such another opportunity would assuredly never present itself twice in my life, that the really great use of the occasion would be to make every inquiry subsidiary to my own case,--to make all my investigations what the Germans would call “Potts-wise.” My intensest anxiety was then to ascertain if, like myself, his Grace started in life with very grand aspirations.