adopted.  On my side, I admitted the rapidity of the pulse, but I also pointed to its alarming feebleness as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as showing a plain necessity for the administration of stimulants.  The two doctors were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so on.  I was for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine.  A serious difference of opinion, as you see! a difference between two physicians of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an assistant in the house.  For the first few days, I had no choice but to give way to my elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the time.  I made a second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain, evidence of the pulse.  Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness had increased.  The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy.  They said, ’Mr. Jennings, either we manage this case, or you manage it.  Which is it to be?’ I said, ’Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and that plain question shall have a plain reply.’  When the time expired, I was ready with my answer.  I said, ’You positively refuse to try the stimulant treatment?’ They refused in so many words.  ’I mean to try it at once, gentlemen.’—­’Try it, Mr. Jennings, and we withdraw from the case.’  I sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I administered half a tumbler-full of it to the patient with my own hand.  The two physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house.”

“You had assumed a serious responsibility,” I said.  “In your place, I am afraid I should have shrunk from it.”

“In my place, Mr. Blake, you would have remembered that Mr. Candy had taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his debtor for life.  In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes.  Don’t suppose that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed myself!  There were moments when I felt all the misery of my friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility.  If I had been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself.  But I had no happy time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into contrast with my present anxiety and suspense—­and I held firm to my resolution through it all.  I took an interval in the middle of the day, when my patient’s condition was at its best, for the repose I needed.  For the rest of the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life was in danger, I never left his bedside.  Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on.  It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morning—­from two o’clock to five—­when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their