I found him in his most awful mood, rude, his nerves unbearably on edge. He said he had not expected me, but when I tried to go, he became angry and begged me to stay, saying that I helped him more than I could ever know. Had I brought the fiddle? I said I would run up the street and get it. “No,” he implored, “don’t go now. You can go later--before supper. _Please_ do not leave me--_please_!” He then said he would tell me something no one else knew, no one except his wife. I wondered what was coming, and felt strangely touched and moved at his treating me with such confidence. His manner was so pathetic, and he seemed suddenly to have become weak and helpless, and somehow or other it was in my power to do him a service. I was thrilled and full of expectation. But, before he began to tell me, he went up to a little cabinet with a glass door and took out a small bottle full of a white powder, bearing the word, the magical word “Majendie”--a word I can never forget as long as I live--and took some of the powder and made a solution and then sucked some of it up with a needle and turned to me. His face was swollen and looked terrible, for the eyes glowed so hotly, and the skin was so red and white in patches. Then he began to open his waistcoat and shirt till his chest was bare. “Look,” he said, for I half moved aside, and when I looked I saw he was covered with hundreds of small red sores. Evidently my face betrayed shrinking and horror, for the old man laughed and said “Oh, I’m not a leper. They’re only blisters,” and then finding a little clear space on his skin, put the needle of his syringe through the flesh and injected the fluid into his body. He next quickly put his finger over the spot and rubbed to and fro for about a minute, staring steadily at me while he did so. “That’s morphine,” he said in a dead voice, “and the rubbing is necessary to prevent a blister forming.” I knew nothing about morphine except the name, and I was disappointed rather than thrilled, but the next minute he gave me all the thrill I wanted, and more besides: “I’ve been fighting it for two years,” he said quietly in German, still rubbing the spot and staring hard at me, “and I am slowly getting the better of it. If I don’t succeed, it means I die.” A cold grim smile that made me shudder stole over his swollen face. “_Death_,” he added. I felt his despair, the despair of doubt, as he said this, and in his eyes blazed suddenly all the suppressed depths of suffering and emotion that he usually kept hidden. Such a flood of sympathy for the old man rose in me that I did not know what to say. Of drugs and their power I knew nothing. I stood and stared in silence, but his voice and manner made me realize one thing: that here was an awful battle, a struggle between human courage, will and endurance, on the one hand, and some tremendous power on the other--a struggle to the death. The word “morphine” seemed to me some sort of demon.