coffee were poison to him; and he afterward told me he should have
said the same of any other three articles I might have mentioned, for
he looked so hale and vigorous, and felt so disgracefully well, that
he was ashamed of himself. We have had many a laugh over it since.
The fact of the matter is the only affliction from which he was
suffering was an inordinate desire to make my acquaintance. Not for
my own sake--oh, dear, no!--but because I was John Darrow's family
physician, and would be reasonably sure to know Gwen Darrow, that
gentleman's daughter. He had first met her, he told me after we had
become intimate, at an exhibition of paintings by William T. Richards,
--but, as you will soon be wondering if it were, on his part, a case
of love at first sight, I had best relate the incident to you in his
own words as he told it to me. This will relieve me of passing any
judgment upon the matter, for you will then know as much about it as
I, and, doubtless, be quite as capable of answering the question, for
candour compels me to own that my knowledge of the human heart is
entirely professional. Think of searching for Cupid's darts with a
stethoscope!

"I was standing," Maitland said, "before a masterpiece of sea and
rock, such as only Richards can paint. It was a view of Land's End,
Cornwall, and in the artist's very best vein. My admiration made
me totally unmindful of my surroundings, so much so, indeed, that,
although the gallery was crowded, I caught myself expressing my
delight in a perfectly audible undertone. My enthusiasm, since it
was addressed to no one, soon began to attract attention, and people
stopped looking at the pictures to look at me. I was conscious of
this in a vague, far-off way, much as one is conscious of a
conversation which seems to have followed him across the borderland
of sleep, and I even thought that I ought to be embarrassed. How