“Why do you do this?” Edwin asked, and when he had recovered from the shyness and diffidence into which the question had cast him, the boy told him that he wrote his verses because he couldn’t help it, because the words became an obsession to him and would not let him sleep until they were written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself in other ways, in the patient’s vivid delight in colours and sounds, and in the strange pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew with coloured chalks. It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic disease had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of natural genius. “There, but for the spite of heaven,” he thought, “goes John Keats,” and, with the feelings of an experimenter in explosives who mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet’s works. The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that he did not understand them; but he would read them all day, mispronouncing the words as the classical student perhaps mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but extracting from their sonorous beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction. A single line would sometimes throw him into a kind of trance, and he would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest and his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to himself his own version of the words without any conception of their real meaning. Sometimes a line would fill him with memories:— “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery moon, and eve’s one star . . .” “That is like our home,” he would say. The house-physician did not approve of these experiments. On principle he would have disapproved of poetry, and in this case he considered the reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any element of health in this misfortune! . . . A few weeks later the patient had an attack of hæmoptysis and died. It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question of the patient’s intellectual state arose. Such speculations might mitigate the fatigue of slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, but the acute medical wards, and particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with death, in which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give support, and sometimes turn the tide.