I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend G.D., who had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right hand path by which he had entered—­with staff in hand, and at noon day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.  A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation.

How I found my feet, I know not.  Consciousness was quite gone.  Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot.  I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies.  In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I—­freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises.

And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or non-application, of salt, &c., to the person of the patient.  Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor.  Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on,—­shall I confess?—­in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken.  Great previous exertions—­and mine had not been inconsiderable—­are commonly followed by a debility of purpose.  This was a moment of irresolution.

MONOCULUS—­for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared—­is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever.  He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant Cannabis outwardly.  But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth for the most part to water-practice; for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middleton’s-Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality—­partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot—­and partly,