"I am exceedingly sorry to say," he began, and directly he opened his mouth I knew that some fresh misfortune was in store for me, "that I can not make up the prescription for you at all. Of one of the drugs I remember once reading, but of the other I have never even heard. However, if----" But before he could utter another word I had seized the paper and was out of the shop. This was the second time I had been fooled, and upward of half an hour, thirty precious minutes, had been wasted. Even then Valerie might be dying, and I was powerless to save her. Never in my life before had time seemed so precious. I stopped a passer-by and inquired the direction of the nearest chemist. He referred me to the shop I had just left; I stopped another, but he confessed himself a stranger in the city. At last, at my wit's end to know what to do, finding myself before the office of the steamship company I had visited that afternoon, I determined to go inside and make inquiries. To my surprise, in place of the half dozen clerks who had stared at me only a few hours before, I found but one man, and before he had opened his lips I realized that he was drunk. "Ha, ha!" he said, with a burst of tipsy laughter, "so you have come back again, my friend? Want to get a boat to take you to England, I suppose. Oh, of course you do. We know all about that. We're not as blind, I mean as blind drunk, as you suppose." With that he lurched against the desk, and cannoned off it on to me. Then, having reached that stage of inebriation when music becomes a necessity, he leant against the wall and burst into song:-- Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine, Or leave a kiss within.... He had got no farther when I took him by the collar, and pushing him back against the wall, bumped his head against it until it is a wonder I did not fracture his skull. "Hold your tongue, you drunken fool!" I said, feeling as if I could kill him where he stood, "and tell me where the man is who attended to me this afternoon." The energy with which I had administered the punishment must have somewhat sobered the fellow, for he pulled himself together, and rubbing the back of his head with his hand asked me if I had heard the news. "I have heard nothing," I cried. "What news do you mean?" "Why, that the man you spoke to this afternoon is dead. He died of the plague within an hour after you were here, rolling on the floor, and making an awful mess of things. Then all the other fellows ran away. They didn't know there was a bottle and a half of brandy in the cupboard in the manager's room, but, bless your heart, I did, and now I'm not afraid of the plague. Don't you believe it!" "Dead?" I cried, for I could scarcely credit that what he told me could be true. The man had seemed so well when I had seen him only a few hours before. However, I had no time to think of him. "I want a chemist," I cried. "I must find one at once. Can you give me the address of one?"