"Odds, my lord, are never even; nor does a wise surgeon express a positive opinion as to the result of even the simplest operation: so many considerations enter into the matter of which a layman has no idea. As regards the case of Mr Emmett, I have only to mention that the operation which I am about to attempt has, so far as I am aware, never hitherto been performed to show how worse than futile, and also, how unprofessional, it would be for me to pose as a prophet." "Hear, hear! Exactly." This encouragement came from Mr Plashett, to whom the word "unprofessional" apparently appealed. Thus supported, Sir Derwent went on, with that pedagogic air for which he was renowned: "I should not wish, on such an occasion, and before such an audience, to enter into those details which could only be properly touched on in an operating theatre; but I may remind you that the subject has already been twice given over as dead, and I can assure you that that is not so strange as to the lay mind it may seem. The conditions were all compatible with death: the motionless pulse and heart; the absence of any movement of the lungs, of any signs of respiration. But it so happens that, in the course of my wide experience, once, and only once, I encountered a similar case, and the knowledge I obtained then I was able to apply now. It was the case of a man who, falling from a fourth-floor window on to the pavement below, fractured the cranial bones almost precisely as Mr Emmett's had been fractured." There were those among his auditors who were disposed to feel that, in spite of what he had said, he was entering into details which were a trifle too technical. But Sir Derwent, having warmed to the subject, went heedlessly on: "In that case also the patient was pronounced to be dead, and he was actually placed in his coffin before it was learned that he wasn't. To put it shortly and popularly, pressure on the _medulla oblongata_, caused by contact of a minute fraction of bone with one of the cranial arteries, had produced that extraordinary simulation of death. Had that state of things been discovered in time an operation might have been possible; but it wasn't. The coffin was placed in the hearse, and the hearse was on the road to the cemetery, when one of the undertaker's men, who was walking beside it, heard a sound proceeding from within, which so startled him that the hearse was driven straight back to the house, and the coffin opened, when it was found that its occupant had turned right over on his side, and had killed himself in doing so. There was no mistake about his being dead that time; and it was only dissection which showed what the cause of death had been, and how he might possibly have been saved. So you see how nearly on all fours the two cases are: Emmett pronounced dead, and, as was supposed, really killing himself by a fall off a table. Found, after all, to be alive, I am now about to attempt the operation