The stone re-formed, but not in the bladder. Once you have a uric acid calculus you can never be quite sure you have done with it until you are dead, and in the case of Mr. Pepys recurrence took place in the kidney. When he died, an old man, in 1703, they performed a post-mortem examination on his body, suspecting that his kidneys were at fault, and in the left kidney found a nest of no less than seven stones, which must have been silently growing in the calyces for unnumbered years. Nor does it seem to me impossible that his extraordinary incontinence--he never seems to have been able to resist any feminine allurement, however coarse--may really have been due to the continued irritation of the old scar in his perineum. There is often a physical condition as the basis for this type of character, and some trifling irritation may make all the difference between virtue and concupiscence. This reasoning is probably more likely to be true than much of the psycho-analysis which is at present so fashionable among young ladies. Possibly also the sterility of Mrs. Pepys may have been partly due to the effects of the operation upon her husband. One unpleasant result to Mr. Pepys was the fact that whenever he crossed his legs carelessly he became afflicted with a mild epididymitis--he describes it much less politely himself, doubtless in wrath. His little failing in this respect must have been a source of innocent merriment to the many friends who were in the secret. He was also troubled with attacks of severe pain whenever the weather turned suddenly cold. At first he used to be in terror lest his old enemy had returned, but he learned to regard the attacks philosophically as part of the common heritage of mankind, for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Probably they were due to reflex irritation from the stones growing in the kidney. He does not seem to have passed any small stones per urethram, or he would assuredly have told us. He took great interest in his own emunctories--probably other people’s, too, from certain dark sayings. Considering the by no means holy living of Mr. Pepys, it is rather remarkable that he never seems to have suffered from venereal disease, and this leads me to suspect that possibly these ailments were not so common in the England of the Restoration as they are to-day. It seems impossible that any man could live in Sydney so promiscuously as Mr. Pepys without paying the penalty; and the experience of our army in London seems to show that things there must be much the same as here (Sydney). I often wonder whether Charles II and his courtiers were really representative of the great mass of people in England at that time; probably the prevalence of venereal disease in modern times is due to the enormous increase in city life; probably men and women have always been very much the same from generation to generation--inflammable as straw, given the opportunities which occur mainly in cities and crowded houses.