He showed no intention of interfering, but watched with interest from the opposite shore, and nearly filled his pocket-book. Then I disappointed him, turned away from the precipice like Box the printer, went to the refreshment-room and ate an ice. This bothered him a good deal, but he noted it down. In the train he got into a carriage conspicuously remote from mine; met a mate in London to whom he communicated his ideas; and, after watching me partake of a melancholy dinner in Lucas's comfortable coffee-room, while he dallied with buns and beer in the front shop, the two followed me to Mr. Hare's pleasant little theatre--I had never dared, after the lowering effect of the associations of the 'establishment,' which seemed to sink me in my own esteem, to raise my eyes above the pit--sat behind me, and watched my conduct in respect of Gilbert's 'Broken Hearts' with a regretful desire evident in their own minds for 'something spicy;' then saw me safe to my hotel for the nonce, and departed with a conscientious feeling of having done their duty detectively, and having entirely escaped my observation. Were they primary scholars in the work, I wonder? And which kept the more accurate notes, the watcher in his book or the watched in his head? Nothing surprises me more, as I think over all that dreary time, than the singular acuteness of observation in me, which no date or detail seems to have escaped. 'Hyperæsthesia,' I suppose, or derangement of the white matter. Perhaps it was an infarction. Well, by the superhuman exertions of Inspector Bucket I had been tracked to my lair, and a doctor descended upon me the next morning, and asked me a few more questions. But he was the one of whom I have spoken as having given a worthy brain to earnest work, and having so signally condemned asylums and delusions. No man could have been more kind and wise. He might well have been deceived into thinking me mad, I think; for by this time, with voices, delusions, visions, and all the nonsense drummed into me, I had well-nigh begun to think myself so. I had hardly any clothes with me, as I wandered with the impression that there must be a full-stop somewhere near. I had not brushed my hair; I looked utterly dazed, and had taken refuge in the smallest room on the topmost story of one of our largest hostelries. If I had been charged as an escaped convict, answer had been difficult. He was not deceived, though, and ordered the rest of mind and body which is sometimes as vain a prescription as port wine and sea-air to the wasted pauper. Failing better roads to it, I was sent off to a hydropathic establishment in the north, once more in the charge of a body-servant, who was not to lose sight of me upon the road. _Ay de mi!_ all the hopeless old story was coming on again.