In my time, I have had opportunities of witnessing, stage by stage, that disease--call it dyspepsia, hypochondriasis, or what you will--it has all names and all forms--which is peculiar to our present state of high civilization, where the mind and the body seem cultivated into perpetual warfare one with the other. This state--some people put poetical names upon it--but we doctors know that it is at least as much physical as mental, and that many a poor misanthrope, who loathes himself and the world, is merely an unfortunate victim of stomach and nerves, whom rest, natural living, and an easy mind, would soon make a man again. But that does not remove the pitifulness and danger of the case. While the man is what he is, he is little better than a monomaniac. If I had not seen him before, the expression of his countenance, as he stood looking down into the river, would have been enough to convince me how necessary it was to keep a strict watch over Mr. Charteris. When the rush of passengers to the gangway made our side of the boat nearly deserted, he sprang up the steps of the paddle-box, and there stood. I once saw a man commit suicide. It was one of ours, returning from the Crimea. He had been drinking hard, and was put under restraint, for fear of delirium tremens; but when he was thought recovered, one day, at broad noon, in sight of all hands, he suddenly jumped overboard. I caught sight of his face as he did so--it was exactly the expression of Francis Charteris. Perhaps, in any case, you had better never repeat the whole of this to your sister. Not till after a considerable struggle did I pull him down to the safe deck once more. There he stood breathless. "You were not surely going to drown yourself, Mr. Charteris?" "I was. And I will." "Try,--and I shall call the police to prevent your making such an ass of yourself." It was no time to choose words, and in this sort of disease the best preventive one can use, next to a firm, imperative will, is ridicule. He answered nothing--but gazed at me in simple astonishment, while I took his arm and led him out of the boat and across the landing-stage. "I beg your pardon for using such strong language, but a man must be an ass indeed, who contemplates such a thing;--here, too, of all places. To be fished up out of this dirty river like a dead rat, for the entertainment of the crowd; to make a capital case at the magistrate's court to-morrow, and a first-rate paragraph in the _Liverpool Mercury_,--'Attempted Suicide of a Gentleman.' Or, if you really succeeded, which I doubt, to be 'Found Drowned,'--a mere body, drifted ashore with cocoa-nut husks and cabbages at Waterloo, or brought in as I once saw at these very stairs, one of the many poor fools who do this here yearly. They had picked him up eight miles higher up the river, and so brought him down, lashed behind a rowing-boat, floating face upwards"-- "Ah!" I felt Charteris shudder.