He sat down in his armchair, lit his pipe, pulled up the operating chair for me to lie on beside him, and then told me very quietly why he took it. Already his face looked different, as the morphine circulated through the blood, and he smiled and wore a genial happy air of benevolence that made him at once a different man. “I shall have peace now for several hours,” he said, “but I don’t take morphine for pleasure. I take it because it is the only way to keep myself alive and to keep my wife and child from starving. If I can gradually wean myself from it I shall live for years. If not, and I cannot make the dose less and less, it will kill me very soon. I am old, you see.” He told me very simply, but very graphically, speaking in German as he loved to do, that three years ago he had enjoyed a good and lucrative practice. But he had embarked upon some experiments in his leg--I never understood exactly what and did not dare to ask--and to observe these properly he was obliged to use the knife without taking any anæsthetic. His wife stood beside him and staunched the blood, but the pain and shock proved more than he was equal to, being an old man, and a collapse followed. All his patients left him, for he could not attend to them, and in order to be in a fit condition to see even chance callers he had to inject morphine. Thus the habit began, and before he knew where he was the thing had him by the throat. He was a man of great natural strength of will and he began to stop it, but the fight was far harder than he had imagined, and his nerves seemed to have gone to pieces. Unless he had the support of a dose, he was so brutal, irritable and rude that no one could stay in his presence, and no patient would come near him. He never got his practice back again, and whenever a stray patient called now he had to take an injection, or he would be sure to behave in such a way that the man or woman would never return. He used atropine to mix with his morphine, and thus tried gradually to cure himself, and lately had succeeded in reducing the quantity very considerably, but it was an awful fight, and he admitted the end was uncertain. He said I helped him to bear the strain. My presence, he said, the music too, gave him some sort of comfort and strength, and he was always glad to see me. When I was there he could hold out longer than when he was alone, and one reason he was telling me all this intimate history--telling it to a comparative stranger--was because he wished me to try and help him more. I stammered some words in broken German about being eager and willing to help, and he smiled and said he thanked me and “we would make the fight together.”