Then he has an important pecuniary loss. There is some talk of instituting legal proceedings, and we fear that he may commit suicide, judging by expressions which he has let fall from time to time. Although recently engaged to be married, he regards the future in the most gloomy light. But instead of resisting his troubles, he takes a journey in order to distract his mind, and on his return invites his friends to a dinner to celebrate the occasion. But in the middle of the festival he has an attack of indisposition and is ordered to bed. As soon as I hear of it, on the second day of his illness, I go to him. A corpse-like odour pervades the house. The patient has grown black in the face, so that he can be scarcely recognised. He lies stretched out on the bed, and is watched by a friend and a nurse, whose hands he does not let go of for a moment. My coming startles him, weakened as he is by his continuous sufferings. Later on, when he is somewhat better, he tells me that he has had a vision of five devils in the shape of red apes with black eyes, which crept up, sat on the edge of his bed, and moved their tails up and down. When he has recovered his strength and put his pecuniary affairs in order, he tells his dream to every one who will listen, and they are much amused at it. From time to time he expresses his astonishment that destiny, which has hitherto favoured him, now begins to persecute him so that nothing will succeed and everything goes wrong. Amid these gloomy reflections, with intervals of cheerfulness, the unhappy man, who seems to have fallen into disfavour with the Powers, receives a fresh and crushing blow. A tradesman, who belonged to his set, has drowned himself, leaving debts, so that my friend who had gone surety for him for a considerable sum is still further embarrassed. His troubles now recommence in earnest. The body of the dead man appears in his kitchen, and he persuades a young doctor to pass the nights with him in order to drive away the phantoms. But the invisible powers are regardless of everything, and one night my friend wakes up to see the whole room full of mice. Fully convinced of their reality, he takes a stick and strikes at them till they disappear. That was an attack of delirium, but an attack shared by two, for in the morning his friend, who occupied the adjoining room, says that he heard the squeaking of mice from my friend's room. How are we to explain a hallucination which is seen by one and heard by another? When this adventure is related in sunshine and broad daylight, it is laughed at. Thereupon my friend begins to give a detailed description of the body of the suicide which had appeared to him, and he accompanies it with deliberately cynical remarks, "Cannot you imagine that it was quite black, and that the white maggots----"