So we drove along in a leisurely way, conversing of Dirk Peters and the Pym story, until we had arranged a plan of action for drawing out of the old man an account of that voyage, the mere thought of which, coming suddenly upon him, had affected him in the terrible manner which I had that afternoon witnessed. Doctor Bainbridge explained to me that the wild demonstrations made by Peters and described by me were a result, not so much of any thought of those adventures on which he must have pondered thousands of times in the forty-eight or forty-nine intervening years, as it was of the manner in which the thoughts or mental pictures had been brought to his mind. "I need only remind you," he said, "of a single mental characteristic within the experience of almost every person, to make this matter clear, and to indicate what our course with the old man must be, and why I said to you to come prepared for a long stay. Suppose, for instance, a woman to have lost her husband through some extremely painful accident, his death being not only sudden but of a horrifying nature, and that several years have elapsed since she was widowed. Now, she has thought the matter over ten thousand times, as the suggestion to do so entered her mind by a hundred different routes, as, for instance, by the seeing of something that her husband in life possessed, or by the drift of her own thought bringing her to the subject by association or by indirect paths of suggestion. Every day her mind has many times pictured the horrible scene of death, until she is dry-eyed and passive amid a storm of sad ideas. But now, after all these years, bring to her mind, suddenly and by a strange route of suggestion, the same old horror--let a voice, and particularly the voice of a stranger, remind her of the terrible scene--and immediately the demonstration follows: the sobs of anguish, the tears, all, as on the day of the accident. It is the method of approach--the mode of suggestion when the fact is known but latent in consciousness, that is responsible for the nervous demonstration. In another instance, visual suggestion might have a similar result and audible suggestion be harmless. I anticipate no serious obstruction in the path to Peters' confidence. Patience, care, deliberate action--the fact ever in mind that 'The more haste the less speed,' and we shall win the prize for which we strive."