More familiar with the symptoms, poor woman, she undoubtedly was, though I was familiar enough; and so, for the matter of that, was the doctor, whose ledger must have registered at least a dozen similar “attacks.”  But I understood at once her true reason for not entrusting me with the errand.  It would require all her courage, all her magnificent impudence, to browbeat Dr. Spargo into coming, for I doubt if the Stimcoes had ever paid him a stiver.

“But you can be very useful,” she went on, in a tone unusually gentle.  “You will find Mr. Stimcoe in his bedroom—­at least, I hope so, for he suffers from a hallucination that some person or persons unknown have incarcerated him in a French war-prison, such being the effect of to-day’s—­er—­proceedings upon his highly strung nature.  The illusion being granted, one can hardly be surprised at his resenting it.”

I nodded, and promised to do my best.

“You are a very good boy, Harry,” said Mrs. Stimcoe—­a verdict so different from that which I had arrived expecting, or with any right to expect, that I stood for some twenty seconds gaping after her as she pulled her shawl closer and went on her heroic way.

I found Mr. Stimcoe in deshabille, on the first-floor landing, under the derisive surveillance of Masters Doggy Bates, Bob Pilkington, and Scotty Maclean, whose graceless mirth echoed down to me from the stair-rail immediately overhead.  Ignoring my preceptor’s invitation to bide a wee and take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne, I ran up and knocked their heads together, kicked them into the dormitory, turned the key on their reproaches, and—­these preliminaries over—­descended to grapple with the situation.

Mr. Stimcoe, in night garments, was conducting a dialogue in which he figured alternately as the tyrant and the victim of oppression.  In the character of Napoleon Bonaparte he had filled a footbath with cold water, and was commanding the Rev. Philip Stimcoe to strip—­as he put it—­to the teeth, and immerse himself forthwith.  As the Rev. Philip Stimcoe, patriot and martyr, he was obstinately, and with even more passion, refusing to do anything of the kind, and for the equally cogent reasons that he was a Protestant of the Protestants and that the water had cockroaches in it.

“Of course,” said Mr. Stimcoe to me, “if you present yourself as Alexander of Russia, there is no more to be said, always provided”—­ and here he removed his nightcap and made me a profound bow—­“that your credentials are satisfactory.”

Apparently they were.  At any rate, I prevailed on him to return to his room, when he took my arm, and, seating himself on the bedside, recited to me the paradigms of the more anomalous Greek verbs with great volubility for twenty minutes on end—­that is to say, until Mrs. Stimcoe returned with the doctor safely tucked under her wing.

At sight of me seated in charge of the patient, Dr. Spargo—­a mild little man—­lifted his eyebrows.