I soon arrived at the house, and rung the front door bell. The same powdered lackey who had preceded me, opened the door. I was led up two pair of stairs, and found myself in the same lobby with which I had already become somewhat familiar. I proceeded forward, thinking I was destined for the sick chamber of the lady; but the servant opened a door immediately next to that of her room, and ushered me into an apartment furnished in an elegant style, but much inferior to that occupied by his wife. In a bed lay a man of a genteel, yet sinister cast of countenance, with a large aquiline nose, and piercing black eyes. He appeared very pale and feverish, and threw upon me that anxious eye which we often find in patients who are under the first access of a serious disease; as if nature, while she kept her secret from the understanding, communicated it to the feelings, whose eloquence, expressed through the senses, we can often read with great facility. I knew, in an instant, that he was committed, by a relentless hand, to suffering, in all likelihood, in the form of a fever. He told me he was Colonel P----, and that, having been very suddenly taken ill, he had become alarmed for himself, and sent for me to administer to him my professional services. I looked at him intently; but he construed my stare into the eagerness of professional investigation. At that instant, a piercing scream rang through the house, and made my ears tingle. I asked him who had uttered that scream, which must have come from some creature in the very extremity of agony, and made an indication as if I would hasten to administer relief to the victim. In an instant, I was close and firm in the trembling clutch of the sick man, who, with a wild and confused look, begged me not to sacrifice him to any attention to the cause of this disturbance, which was produced by a servant in the house habitually given, through fits of hysterics, to the utterance of these screams. I put on an appearance of being satisfied with this statement; but I fixed my eye relentlessly on him, as he still shook, from the combined effects of his incipient disease, and his fear of my investigating the cause of the scream. I proceeded to examine into the nature of his complaint. The symptoms described by him, and detected by my observation, satisfied me that he had been seized with an attack of virulent typhus; and from the intensity of some of the indications--particularly his languor and small pulse, his loss of muscular strength, violent pains in the head, the inflammation of his eyes, the strong throbbing of his temporal arteries, his laborious respiration, parched tongue, and hot breath--I was convinced he had before him the long sands of a rough and rapid race with death. At the close of my investigation he looked anxiously and wistfully in my face, and asked me what I conceived to be the nature of his complaint. I told him at once, and with greater openness and readiness than I usually