I turned round; I found a goblet on the wash-stand; I took Lycidas’s heavy clothes-brush, and knocked off the neck of the bottle.  Did you ever do it, reader, with one of those pressed glass bottles they make now?  It smashed like a Prince Rupert’s drop in my hand, crumbled into seventy pieces,—­a nasty smell of whiskey on the floor,—­and I, holding just the hard bottom of the thing with two large spikes running worthless up into the air.  But I seized the goblet, poured into it what was left in the bottom, and carried it in to Morton as quietly as I could.  He bade me give Lycidas as much as he could swallow; then showed me how to substitute my thumb for his, and compress the great artery.  When he was satisfied that he could trust me, he began his work again, silently; just speaking what must be said to that brave Mary, who seemed to have three hands because he needed them.  When all was secure, he glanced at the ghastly white face, with beads of perspiration on the forehead and upper lip, laid his finger on the pulse, and said:  “We will have a little more whiskey.  No, Mary, you are overdone already; let Fred bring it.”  The truth was that poor Mary was almost as white as Lycidas.  She would not faint,—­that was the only reason she did not,—­and at the moment I wondered that she did not fall.  I believe George and I were both expecting it, now the excitement was over.  He called her Mary and me Fred, because we were all together every day of our lives.  Bridget, you see, was still nowhere.

So I retired for my whiskey again,—­to attack that other bottle.  George whispered quickly as I went, “Bring enough,—­bring the bottle.”  Did he want the bottle corked?  Would that Kelt ever come up stairs?  I passed the bell-rope as I went into the dressing-room, and rang as hard as I could ring.  I took the other bottle, and bit steadily with my teeth at the cork, only, of course, to wrench the end of it off.  George called me, and I stepped back.  “No,” said he, “bring your whiskey.”

Mary had just rolled gently back on the floor.  I went again in despair.  But I heard Bridget’s step this time.  First flight, first passage; second flight, second passage.  She ran in in triumph at length, with a screw-driver!

“No!” I whispered,—­“no.  The crooked thing you draw corks with,” and I showed her the bottle again.  “Find one somewhere and don’t come back without it.”  So she vanished for the second time.

“Frederic!” said Morton.  I think he never called me so before.  Should I risk the clothes-brush again?  I opened Lycidas’s own drawers,—­papers, boxes, everything in order,—­not a sign of a tool.

“Frederic!” “Yes,” I said.  But why did I say “Yes”?  “Father of Mercy, tell me what to do.”

And my mazed eyes, dim with tears,—­did you ever shed tears from excitement?—­fell on an old razor-strop of those days of shaving, made by C. WHITTAKER, SHEFFIELD.  The “Sheffield” stood in black letters out from the rest like a vision.  They make cork screws in Sheffield too.  If this Whittaker had only made a corkscrew!  And what is a “Sheffield wimble?”