Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw at a glance that this was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to buy it, and had marked it for purchase; but with the determination and that pencilled cross the transaction had ended. Yet, having resolved to buy it had served me almost as effectively as though I had actually bought it; I thought--aye, I could have sworn--I HAD bought it, simply because I MEANT to buy it. "The experience is not unique," said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it to him at our next meeting. "Speaking for myself, I can say that it is a confirmed habit with me to mark certain items in catalogues which I read, and then to go my way in the pleasing conviction that they are actually mine." "I meet with cases of this character continually," said Dr. O'Rell. "The hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific one by pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by means of hypnotism. Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in serious distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears that her husband was upon the verge of insanity. Her testimony was to the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was limited to three hundred or thereabouts. "Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers' catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.'s great-uncle on his mother's side had invented a flying-machine that would not fly, and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet entitled '16 to 1; or the Poor Man's Vade-Mecum.' "'Madam,' said I, 'it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted with catalogitis.' "At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so grievous as to require a Greek name. When she became calmer I explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it yielded readily to treatment." "What, in plain terms," asked Judge Methuen, "is catalogitis?" "I will explain briefly," answered the doctor. "You must know first that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the latter. Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)--Hippocrates, I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.