This is not a medical work, and it is no part of its business to locate exactly the case of Robert Steptoe in medical records. The discrimination of the symptoms of _delirium tremens_ proper, and their points of difference from those of ordinary delirium--nervous or feverish--are matters of great interest, especially in their relation to treatment, but they belong elsewhere. Our function is limited to recording the symptoms of the case as they have been brought to our knowledge; and we must hope that our medical readers will allow a certain latitude to the description of the only instance of the malady that has come within its writer's experience. Some of it is necessarily conjectural, but nothing would be gained by a laborious effort to separate these portions from the certainties. For instance, the patient's hours in the room alone, after his wife left him, must be matter of surmise. But surmise to the following effect appears well grounded. So long as the effect continued of the small dose of stimulant he had discovered, he remained sane and free from immediate delusion, and had no other intentions than to smoke through his pipe and follow his wife to bed, as promised. But after he had finished it, and knocked the ashes out--they were found on the hob, and the pipe stuck in the looking-glass frame, when the ground was gone over afterwards--his attention was arrested by something crawling over the table. He had seen one before (as appears by our narrative), in fact, he had seen several, causing a sympathetic horror in Aunt Stingy. He tried to destroy this one, but nothing came of the attempt. Putting a volume on it and crushing it down only caused it to come through the book and crawl over it. He tried this frequently, wondering at the result, but not specially alarmed--more amused perhaps in a kind of vacuous way--until he saw another, and then another. The place was all over them, and he called them names--some very inappropriate--and qualified them all with his favourite adjective. In themselves they really did not matter. But most unfortunately the fact that they were all going in the same direction showed him that they were emanations from a man of the name of Preedy, a leather-seller, of whom he used to purchase ready-closed uppers and cuttings. It was shrewd of him, he thought, to identify Preedy as their original source by the steady way in which they all kept going in one direction. And still shrewder to infer that it was all part of a scheme to oust him from the sort of little kennel or box in which he carried on his trade in a street half a mile off. It was left locked at night; but, seen by the light of these vermin, and a buzzing noise that accompanied them, what was to prevent Preedy getting possession of it and bribing the police on duty to support him in his usurpation? He sat down for a minute or two longer to think this out. The room was always well lighted, because the street gas-lamp, just