affair -- I was down at Wookey -- a boy. I missed
all that. . . . What a fuss we had with him! My
landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay --
he looked so queer when he was rigid. We had to
carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And the
Boscastle doctor -- it wasn't the present chap, but the
G.P. before him -- was at him until nearly two, with,
me and the landlord holding lights and so forth."

"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"

"Stiff! -- wherever you bent him he stuck. You
might have stood him on his head and he'd have
stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course this"
-- he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of
his head -- "is quite different. And, of course, the
little doctor -- what was his name?"

"Smithers?"

"Smithers it was -- was quite wrong in trying to
fetch him round too soon, according to all accounts.
The things he did. Even now it makes me feel all --
ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those
beastly little things, not dynamos --"

"Induction coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump,
and he twisted about. There was just two flaring