down there?” he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon my mind in a lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness.  “They are all asleep,” I answered, watching him narrowly.  That was it.  That’s what he wanted to hear; these were the exact words that could calm him.  He drew a long breath.  “Ssh!  Quiet, steady.  I am an old stager out here.  I know them brutes.  Bash in the head of the first that stirs.  There’s too many of them, and she won’t swim more than ten minutes.”  He panted again.  “Hurry up,” he yelled suddenly, and went on in a steady scream:  “They are all awake—­millions of them.  They are trampling on me!  Wait!  Oh, wait!  I’ll smash them in heaps like flies.  Wait for me!  Help!  H-e-elp!” An interminable and sustained howl completed my discomfiture.  I saw in the distance the accident case raise deplorably both his hands to his bandaged head; a dresser, aproned to the chin showed himself in the vista of the ward, as if seen in the small end of a telescope.  I confessed myself fairly routed, and without more ado, stepping out through one of the long windows, escaped into the outside gallery.  The howl pursued me like a vengeance.  I turned into a deserted landing, and suddenly all became very still and quiet around me, and I descended the bare and shiny staircase in a silence that enabled me to compose my distracted thoughts.  Down below I met one of the resident surgeons who was crossing the courtyard and stopped me.  “Been to see your man, Captain?  I think we may let him go to-morrow.  These fools have no notion of taking care of themselves, though.  I say, we’ve got the chief engineer of that pilgrim ship here.  A curious case.  D.T.’s of the worst kind.  He has been drinking hard in that Greek’s or Italian’s grog-shop for three days.  What can you expect?  Four bottles of that kind of brandy a day, I am told.  Wonderful, if true.  Sheeted with boiler-iron inside I should think.  The head, ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious part is there’s some sort of method in his raving.  I am trying to find out.  Most unusual—­that thread of logic in such a delirium.  Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn’t.  Good old tradition’s at a discount nowadays.  Eh!  His—­er—­visions are batrachian.  Ha! ha!  No, seriously, I never remember being so interested in a case of jim-jams before.  He ought to be dead, don’t you know, after such a festive experiment.  Oh! he is a tough object.  Four-and-twenty years of the tropics too.  You ought really to take a peep at him.  Noble-looking old boozer.  Most extraordinary man I ever met—­medically, of course.  Won’t you?”

’I have been all along exhibiting the usual polite signs of interest, but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of want of time, and shook hands in a hurry.  “I say,” he cried after me; “he can’t attend that inquiry.  Is his evidence material, you think?”

‘"Not in the least,” I called back from the gateway.’