"Feel as though I should like to race somebody twenty rods for five pound a-side," answered the patient, getting up and walking about the room as if it were a new sensation. He had been brought, it appeared, to Mr. Ashman by his friend, who was sitting at the table, and who was an old psychopathic patient. He assured me he had suffered from rheumatism for twenty years, and was completely disabled without his stick until he came into that room half-an-hour since. He walked up and down stickless and incessantly as the carnivora at the Zoo all the time he was telling me. "Would you mind putting your ear to this man's back, sir?" said Mr. Ashman to me. I did so; and when he bent, his backbone seemed to go off with a lot of little cracks like the fog-signals of a railway. "That there old rusty hinge we mean to grease." And away he went psychopathizing him again. When he was done, Mr. Ashman explained to me learnedly, and with copious illustrations from anatomical plates, his theory of this disease, which was his favourite one for treatment, because it yielded rapidly. Paralysis and that class of disease are much slower. He had succeeded in acute rheumatism, and also in calculus. "I like fat men--fighting men to heal," he said. "I leave the delicate ones to others." The sturdy little psychopathist looked healthy enough to heal a sick rhinoceros. While he was lecturing me his hands were not idle. I should think they seldom were. He was pouring salad oil from a flask on to flannel to give to the other man who was sitting at the table, and had approached convalescence from a chronic disease after one or two visits, and who used this oiled flannel to keep up the influence. Both the men seemed perfectly genuine; and the rheumatic gentleman, when he left, pronounced the effect of his psychopathizing miraculous. The fee was five shillings. "I shan't charge you nothin' for the flannel," he said to No. 2. I began to take quite a fancy to Joseph Ashman, and thanked _Figaro_ inwardly for directing me to the institution.