On the morning of my departure, just as I was about to start for the cars, I received a telegram:

"Please come at once

G. B. is raving mad.

CONRAD KRAETPFUHL.' 99

I found a disorganised household when I arrived at Undercliff. The servants were confused and unintelligible; Mrs. Brooker met me in a condition of great agony. "You have come too late!" she cried. "He is gone, and I shall never forgive myself for it!"

"Gone! where?"

"He was so violent we had to send him over the river to Dr. Hobbell's asylum. They took him away this morning, and oh! he begged so hard when he found he must go. I shall never forgive myself."

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My dear Mrs. Brooker," said I, "you have acted most wisely. He will be properly treated, and I doubt not speedily restored to you." But the unhappy lady would not be comforted, and while I was saying over to her the commonplace words of condolence which are our only resource upon such painful occasions, one of the doors of the room was burst vehemently open, and the worthy Doctor Krätpfuhl came at me with both of his arms extended, and his face fairly sloppy with tears. In spite of my endeavors to resist him the Doctor got his arms around me and embraced me, and put his damp face to mine and kissed me in his disagreeable German way.

"My tear friend," he cried when I at last got loose from him, “I am so glad you have arrive! You presence is like light to my soul ! Now, my tear madam, we shall know what is to be done, and how to disembarrass the unhappy victim of our wretched conspiracies! So, my tear madam, outpluck yourself from the slough of despond once more, for I know that all will be right. Papae!" he cried, slapping me on the back, "your face is like the face of one's countryman when one is lost in a far strange land. My tear madam, we have many things to discourse one with another -you will excuse us.' And, placing his hand under my arm, he trundled me off incontinently to his own rooms, where, amid pipes, books, gallipots, retorts, and most diabolical confusion and dust, he found a couple of chairs, a pipe for himself, and sat down by me to talk.

"What has happened?" I asked; "has Brooker gone mad?"

"Violent attack of acute mania," said the Doctor; “I had for it been preparing, but it came with such force-sturmwetter! We have to capture the madman at risk of our lives. Alexis, his valet, has a shoulder dislocated; I have shirt and coat and waistcoat rent from see those remaining tatters in yonder corner - and if not my back rescued, should have been strangled with mine own cravat! He is safe to the asylum, now, and will soon yield to treatment. If he shall only not fall after that into melancholy! If we can only devise a shock to rouse him when the raging fit is passed."

"But what does all this mean anyhow, Doctor? What is the cause of Brooker's insanity ?"

"Mea culpa mea culpa!" cried the Doctor, tearing his hair and

weeping with an air of unaffected compunction and misery that made my pity for him overcome the almost irresistible temptation to laugh at him. "I did it always for the best, his wife and I, but the project has failed. I will never play again with things so delicate as souls. Mea culpa!"

"What is your fault? What did you do?" I asked impatiently. "You know what he thought he found? Ach! as I told you - if his mind could occupy itself easily until his body was able to take care of it, he was permanently cured - if he could be kept at his plough with a will and an interest working, it was altogether well. He believed in that Kyd of the pirate myth- - he wanted to dig, but I demanded to have him plough. What you said about Johannes Wilde gave me a hint me miserum! I consulted madam the wife, and together we

"Salted' the meadow !" cried I, taking in the thing at a glance. "Salted him? No- but golded and silvered him most elaborately, with the coin of an old Spanish collection which I knew of, and which Mees Brooker bought with her private fortune."

"It was an ingenious plan, Doctor."

"Yes, but it failed. Papae! my friend, one monomaniac is like another. George Brooker is the fac-simile of John Wilde. I turned his thoughts away from Kyd by a little clever-what you call it? management. But I saw that his brain was turned at once, and that what I had devised to keep him from growing insane had been by his perverse ingenuity converted into the very especial pabulum of madness. He gave up Kyd, but took at once to John Wilde, and believed himself ministered to by a fairy who had command of all the riches of the earth-tunnelling gnomes, and who was determined to make him wealthy beyond the utmost soaring of human conception. He made a machine. papae! It is a curiosity which I will show to you a plough that goes round in an ever-lessening circle until it reaches the centre, which in turn is continually moved, so that the plough, revolving always, has always new ground for its point to turn up. But it failed the moidores and pistoles and ducats were exhausted, in short. I had stolen from him several times, until he missed them and locked them up, and there was nothing to - how you call it?-salt the meadow. Papae! he charge me with injuring the machine with magic-with robbery. He turned upon the machine and broke it; he turned upon himself at last, and then, when arrested, the storm broke with frightful fury. Mea culpa! mea culpa !"

"What is to be done now?"

"Nothing but wait. My good friend Doctor Hobbell is an expert. He knows the particulars of our friend's case. Two or three days of his treatment, in the quiet atmosphere of the asylum, and Meester Brooker will be ready for the action of my plan "What! you have another plan, Doctor? I thought"Yes, yes," said he, "I have a blan! Mein Gott, what else can I do?" And he clasped his hands over the top of his head in his old despairing gesture. "I have caused all this trouble: I myself will repair it. I am the Jonah. I will allay the storm by giving the

whale wherewith to feed his insatiate cruel maw! I am calmly resolved what to do. I will immolate myself upon the altar of friendship, Meester Graves! Yes, I have a blan that shall save my friend Meester Brooker; that shall save him and destroy me! This room, these comforts, these pipes, I shall see you no more. I go out from mein paradise it is a leetle in disarray, this morning it to me is nevertheless a paradise, and I go out from it — Adamus exul! But I do not murmur. I'am content. My friends are better to me as myself. You will appreciate my martyrdom, mein tear friend. One day you will tell him of it." And the Doctor, to my surprise, rose, and embraced me, and wept upon my shoulder.

I quieted the preposterous old baby, and got him to tell me his "blan," which he did with many sobs, and much blank staring and amazement on account of the uncontrollable laughter with which I was seized as he unfolded it before me in all its startling details. None but a half-mad and wholly big-hearted German of genius and learning could ever have devised such a scheme for experimenting on his own body in pursuit of means to restore his friend to mind and health and home. Suffice it to say, I accepted the "blan" without reserve, and engaged to perform the part in it which was assigned to me. We agreed that it would not do for us to confide its elements to Mrs. Brooker, but I was able to comfort the unhappy lady by assuring her that her husband should be restored to her in less than a week.

I had been four days at "Undercliff" when a note came to Doctor Krätpfuhl from his friend across the river.

"It is all right! he cried; "to-morrow the blan we will put in force. He is quiet and rational, Dr. Hobbell says; but needs change of scene and air and thought. Ha ha! we will give him change of thought. The boat will be ready for you to-morrow in the morning."

Next day, early, I told Mrs. Brooker simply that I was going to fetch George home to her, restored, and that it would be advisable to make things look as light, gay and attractive as possible, to receive him calmly, to have music, and to make little reference to the past. Then I went to the river, escorted by Dr. Krätpfuhl, and propelled by the stout arms of a couple of boatmen, was soon set across the river, where I found Dr. Hobbell's carriage waiting for me. As we were going to practise a little deception upon poor George, I told the Doctor what our plans were, and he approved them at once. "It is the very thing your friend requires," said he, as he handed me into his reception-room; "he needs a shock, and he has lost confidence in himself that must be restored. His reason is not impaired, if you I will send him to you.' can only make him believe so. Presently George came in, with slow and lingering step, a little pale, a little confused, but otherwise completely himself. I ran to him and seized his hands in a cordial grasp.

66

My dear George!" I cried, "I am very glad to see you! I am very glad to see that you have not suffered any more from this outrageous imprisonment. Come, get your hat; I cannot let you stay here a moment longer. I came for you the moment I heard of it." "No," said he, with the most lugubrious face; "I shall stay here.

I am a lunatic-it is not safe for me to be abroad this is the proper place for me!"

Get

Nonsense!" I cried; "this is not like George Brooker. your hat and come with me at once. Your interests require it; there are things to look after and punishments to inflict." He shook his head mournfully. "I shall stay here I am not fit to be abroad. I am insane, I tell you. I have hallucinations. I believe in Captain Kyd and underground gnomes. My vagaries may take a violent turn and lead me unwittingly to do harm. I shall stay here."

"George, is it possible that a vile conspiracy could have power to break your spirits down this completely? I would not have believed

it. I thought you were a different sort of man." Conspiracy! What do you mean?"

"Is it so? Are you still in the dark, George?"

"Speak out, John Graves! I've had riddles enough."

Why, George well, none are so blind as those who will not see. Don't you know you have the clearest case of false imprisonment that ever lawyer pleaded? Don't you know that you are not more insane than I am?

the gold

"Well - you must have found it, or you couldn't have sent any of it to me. The only wonder I have is that you should never have guessed who put it there."

"Who-put-it- there!"

·

"To deceive you, yes! Why, George-you remember Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary,' don't you? And Sir Arthur? And Dousterswivel? Well, you have been patronising a Dousterswivel, old fellow! That Krätpfuhl'salted' your golden furrows for you."

George bounced as if he had been shot. Conspiracy!" he cried. "Krätpfuhl! A plot to drive me mad-and send me here, under lock and key, and get control of my property, and -I see it all! Blind, stupid fool! Where is Krätpfuhl?

"I left him at your house this morning," said I, demurely. George said no more upon the subject of his incompetency to leave the asylum. He hurried for his hat, and in less time than it takes me to tell it, was ready to go, and pressing me to depart. In a couple of hours more the boatmen landed us at the foot of the lawn at "Undercliff."

"Hark!" said George, as he took my arm and pushed me along towards the house, "music, as I live! They make merry while I am gone."

In good scoth, a brace of violins and a clarinet were discoursing some extremely lively waltzes from the veranda. Suddenly, George held me back, and gripping my arm as if in a vise, whispered, or as .the melodramatists have it, hissed in my ear:

"See there!"

There was a croquet-party on the lawn. A very juvenile Miss and her spark from the neighborhood were opposed to Mrs. George Brooker and Doctor Krätpfuhl. Mrs. Brooker was exquisitely dressed

in dinner costume; as for the Doctor, his dress was as elaborate as that of a foreign embassador, and the courtly devotion, the tenderness, the general empressement of his manner towards his partner would have to be seen—they cannot be described.

"The Doctor rather overdoes it, I think," I was saying to myself; "and if he knew George as well as I do or were less completely forgetful of self in his plan of immolation, he would-" George gripped my arm too tightly for me to continue the thought. He had reason. The Doctor was kneeling, in some part of the game, at Mrs. Brooker's very feet. He looked up into her face, he murmured something we could not hear, but from his languishing air could readily guess; he seized her hand in his own fat hand, and mumbled it ridiculously, and Mrs. Brooker started from him indignantly, and fetched him such a swinging box on the ears that he was very near capsized.

"She is not in the plot, at any rate," I said, pitying the poor Doctor.

Instantly George was on the scene, and his glad wife had him in her arms and was sobbing on his breast. This created a momentary diversion, and I had time to reach the scene and quietly motion the Doctor to retire, and take a croquet-mallet from George's hand ere his bottled wrath broke forth.

"Conspirator! villain!" he cried, advancing on Krätpfuhl, who retreated, while his wife clung to George and bade him not notice the low fellow, who was beneath him. "You have dared to plot against me, have you?" still advancing.

"Excellent!" cried the Doctor, looking towards me; "the physic works. Jealousy is a master-passion always."

"Jealous! of you!" cried George, and rushing upon him, inflicted a tremendous kick. "Off the place at once! Never show your face again on these premises!"

"Ach!" cried the poor Doctor, alternately shedding tears of joy and of pain, full both of aches and enthusiasm, as he retreated lame but rejoicing. "It is a cure! It is grand! It is superb! Farewell, my tear friend. I have made my sagrifice and it has been excepted. Farewell!"

And he disappeared among the shrubbery.

George and his wife went abroad, and in the course of three years of travel his health was completely restored. Upon their return I found means to make explanations such as brought the worthy old Krätpfuhl back again into greater favor than ever. George found that he had no cause to be jealous of the Doctor, since during his absence Krätpfuhl had imported a fair-haired, apple-cheeked frau for himself

The

a lady of middle age and gentle manners, who had been waiting innumerable years for her Conrad to redeem their early vows. pair have a cottage in the near neighborhood of "Undercliff," and I always meet them there in my frequent visits.

George has never had a return of his hallucination, and it is not likely that he ever will have. He is an excellent gentleman, a good citizen, and lives most happily.

EDWARD SPENCER.