But I am keeping my old doctor waiting. He looked and moved, and I dare say tried to believe himself, the absolute incarnation of respectable Benevolence. The frock-coat, dark suit, and white cravat in the initial stage of strangulation, which are to so many people a sort of badge of a doctor's degree in divinity, law, or medicine, and the hall-mark of a good heart, carried out the illusion. He began to do good-natured things at intervals; I suppose from a spasmodic sense that he might as well try to cure a patient sometimes, instead of leaving them all entirely to the salutary effects of association. He once proposed to go through a course of Greek Testament readings with me, and we accomplished an entire chapter, but dropped the cure at that point. My power of reading Greek at sight appeared to impress him much, as by force of contrast with his insane patients it well might. But it failed to incite him to further efforts for my recovery and release. The Grossmith anecdote, to be taken at intervals, was an easier prescription. Though he had taken very kindly, however, to the work which he had accepted in life, he yet never gave me the impression of being altogether 'undisturbed by conscientious qualms,' and of having been able to silence the monitor which must have pleaded at times so loudly within him. He was one of those men who never look one straight in the face. And though he had constructed a little chapel in the establishment, where services were held on Sunday evenings, he did not attend those services himself. Perhaps he may have feared that prayers for 'prisoners and captives,' and the solemn appeals to Him 'who helpeth them to right that suffer wrong,' might stick in his throat like Macbeth's 'Amen.' He was happier in his own little house, at some distance from the asylum, where he lived, with none of the unfortunates under his immediate eye. He pottered about among a large variety of baby greenhouses, which he had constructed on patterns of his own, or made geological investigations under his fields, where he had hit upon a vein of quartz--or pintz, or something--of which great things were to come. Little quarries were scattered all over the place, and much lunacy must have been necessary to support them. He was a great inventor, the doctor, and was much distressed by the evident want of mental power that I once showed by wandering helplessly from the point when he was expounding to me a plan for some stove which was to give heat without light, or light without heat, or both or neither. I betrayed after a time an utter unconsciousness of what he was saying, which I fear must have outweighed in the balance my mastery of the Greek Testament. Human nature is a parlous thing. In moments even more confidential he explained to me how he had been an inventor from his youth, and how one of the greatest discoveries of Simpson of Edinburgh had in fact been made by him, and by him confided to his ungrateful colleague.