We were able also to keep our St. Silvester with the Gutmansthals, but so many people had gone away, that it was not the same as the year before. On the 6th of December, 1883, he puts the following notice in his journal in red ink:-- "To-day, eleven years ago, I came here; what a shame!!!" He notices the death of Richard Doyle the 11th of December. 1884. At this time we were far from being well off, and we were obliged to incur many expenses for Richard's illness; besides which, I hoped he would get change of air. It may be imagined, therefore, that when the news of the death of an aunt by marriage who did not care very much for me, and whom I very seldom saw, reached me that I received the intelligence that she had left me a legacy of £500 with pleasure. All the early part of the year we had a bad time of it. Richard had insisted on going back to the big room, and once he had put on a damp coat. I always think that foreign doctors do not understand English constitutions, which can never stand starving, and they do always starve you. He went on alternately better and worse. In all these attacks I never left his room, day or night, and I frequently used to disobey orders as to diet. When he was free from pain he was immensely cheerful, and used to laugh like a schoolboy at his doctor, who _would_ speak English for the sake of learning and practising it. "What him eat to-day?" "Pheasant, doctor!" He plunged his hands into his hair as if he were going to tear it all out. "What for you give him the wild?" (German, _das wild_, meaning game). One day after about six months he said, "You sall give him ten drops of rum in a tumbler of water for his dinner!" Peals of laughter came from the sick-bed. "Ach! das ist gut to hear him laugh like dat? Vat for he laugh?" I answered, "Because he gets a brandy-grog fit for a sailor every night, or he would have been a dead man long ago." More tearing of the hair and real displeasure. When he got over that illness he was a veritable skeleton; his legs were like two sticks of sealing-wax.