“The charm is very powerful,” he went on, “especially to a nature like mine, for when I take this stuff the world becomes full of wonder and mystery again, just as it was for me sixty years ago when I was a boy with burning hopes and high dreams. But far more than that, I _believe in people_ again. That makes more difference in your life than anything else, for to lose faith in men makes life unbearable. Bitter experiences have shaken my trust and belief in my fellow creatures. But with this stuff in me I find it again and feel at peace with the world.” “That is why you sometimes approve and at other times disapprove of my attitude towards Boyde?” “Yes,” he said, with a most benign and delightful expression in his eyes. “Give him every chance. There’s lots of good in him. He feels, no doubt, that everyone who knows about him distrusts him. Weak men will always try more or less to live up to what is expected of them, for they are easily hypnotised. If they feel every one expects only evil from them their chief incentive is lost.” “Then I ought never to let him think I’ve lost belief in him?” “Never. Frighten him, kick him, urge him along with violence, anything to make him move of himself towards being decent; but never suggest he _cannot_ be, and _is not_, decent and straight.” How we talked that night--and how I suffered from hunger, for when morphine was in him the old doctor ate little, and this time he was full of ideas and ideals, and had so sympathetic a listener, that he forgot I might want food, and it was not till after one in the morning that he began to flag and thought of coffee. We went down into the kitchen, and there we found the patient wife dozing on the wooden chair, and the child reading a book--“Undine”--on the deal table, with her eyes so bright I thought they were going to shoot out flame. She looked up and stared at us for a long time before she got herself back from that enchanted region of woods and pools and moonlight.... Strange supper parties they were, in that quiet, basement-kitchen between one and two of the winter mornings of December, 1892.... Otto Huebner, having broken the ice, told me much of his own life then. Owing to family disputes he left the manufacturing town in Northern Germany where he was born and brought up, and came to New York as a young man. He never saw his parents again, and took out naturalization papers at once. For years he was employed by Steinway’s piano factory, as a common workman at first, then as a skilled man. He was unmarried, he saved money, he began to study at night; the passion for medicine was so strong in him that he made up his mind to become a doctor. He attended lectures when he could. It was a life of slavery, of incessant toil both day and night. He was over forty when he began studying for the examinations, and it took him seven years to attain his end. His health had suffered during this strenuous time. He had married well after fifty....