’I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered these notebooks.  I intended letting you have them months ago, but my habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from whom I took down the words, prevented me.  Now she is dead, and as a literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you can manage to read them.  You may even find them valuable.

’I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will tell you in the old Pitman’s something about her.  Her name was Miss Mary Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died, and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years.  Do you know anything about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance?  Well, that was the relation between us—­hypnotist and subject.  She had been under another man before my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered from tic douloureux of the fifth nerve.  She had had most of her teeth drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the nerve on the left side by the external scission.  But it made no difference:  all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor woman’s jaw, and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across me.  My organisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, control over hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.

’Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as my friend, Miss Wilson.  Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold her suddenly without a sensation of shock:  she suggested so inevitably what we call “the other world,” one detecting about her some odour of the worm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman.  And yet I can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as to the contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashen cheeks.  She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton, except the thigh-bones, being quite visible.  Her eyes were of the bluish hue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthly gaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.

’She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five miles from Ash Thomas.  As you know, I was “beginning” in these parts at the time, and soon took up my residence at the manor.  She insisted that I should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constituted the most lucrative practice which I ever had.