To go back to the origin of this story, it began with a pain--intermittent at first, but soon becoming violent and continuous. When it reached this stage I called in a physician, who pronounced it a bad attack of something with a strange name, which being reduced to simple English meant there was something wrong with my left kidney. He gave me a hypodermic of morphine and two days later I developed a bad case of septic pneumonia which, with resultant complications, laid me low for eight weeks. While convalescing from this I wrote a book on stock market speculation. I don’t know what prompted me to write such a book at such a time, unless it was that something in the nearness of my approach to the realms of the unknown reminded me of how near I came to leaving the world unprotected against the pitfalls of Wall Street. In due time I recovered from both the pneumonia and the book, but the kidney was still belligerent, and about every six weeks, to quell its savage attacks I had to take morphine and spend a few days in bed with it. In the fall of that year while on a visit to my mother-in-law in Minneapolis I was persuaded to take this refractory organ to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota; and that sequestered little town, which in the domain of operations, sickness and suffering occupies about the same position as New York City does in the world of finance, provided the setting for the semi-tragic episode herein related, in which for many weeks I played the leading rôle before a mixed assemblage of doctors, nurses and anxious relatives. Fielding tells us that to prolong scenes of distress to an unwonted degree is a task for which the reader feels but little indebted to the author. Therefore since we have here to deal chiefly with grim-faced facts such as are usually productive of more awe than amusement I shall treat the whole catastrophe as lightly as the circumstances will permit. But after all, a serious illness or an operation--like lion hunting, stock market ventures and suchlike hazards--has its varied and interesting phases; and many of its gloomy aspects are susceptible of humorous interpretation when viewed in retrospect by those who survive to tell the story.