any spirituous liquor. Whereupon the gentleman said, 'Come, come, Doctor,
this won't do--though it is very kind of you to say so for my sake--for I
know that you take a very large glass of hot gin and water every evening
after your dinner.' (This belief still survives, and was mentioned to my
brother in 1884 by an old inhabitant of Shrewsbury.--F.D.) So my father
asked him how he knew this. The man answered, 'My cook was your kitchen-
maid for two or three years, and she saw the butler every day prepare and
take to you the gin and water.' The explanation was that my father had the
odd habit of drinking hot water in a very tall and large glass after his
dinner; and the butler used first to put some cold water in the glass,
which the girl mistook for gin, and then filled it up with boiling water
from the kitchen boiler.

"My father used to tell me many little things which he had found useful in
his medical practice. Thus ladies often cried much while telling him their
troubles, and thus caused much loss of his precious time. He soon found
that begging them to command and restrain themselves, always made them weep
the more, so that afterwards he always encouraged them to go on crying,
saying that this would relieve them more than anything else, and with the
invariable result that they soon ceased to cry, and he could hear what they
had to say and give his advice. When patients who were very ill craved for
some strange and unnatural food, my father asked them what had put such an
idea into their heads; if they answered that they did not know, he would
allow them to try the food, and often with success, as he trusted to their
having a kind of instinctive desire; but if they answered that they had
heard that the food in question had done good to some one else, he firmly
refused his assent.

"He gave one day an odd little specimen of human nature. When a very young
man he was called in to consult with the family physician in the case of a