I shall close this book, and take my full dose
—five hundred drops.

June 22nd.—Our prospects look better
to-day. Mr. Blake's nervous suffering is greatly
allayed. He slept a little last night. My night,
thanks to the opium, was the night of a man
who is stunned. I can't say that I woke this
morning; the fitter expression would be, that
I recovered my senses.

We drove to the house to see if the refurnishing
was done. It will be completed to-morrow
—Saturday. As Mr. Blake foretold, Betteredge
raised no further obstacles. From first to last,
he was ominously polite, and ominously silent.

My medical enterprise (as Betteredge calls
it) must now, inevitably, be delayed until
Monday next. To-morrow evening, the workmen
will be late in the house. On the next
day, the established Sunday tyranny which is
one of the institutions of this free country, so
times the trains as to make it impossible to ask
anybody to travel to us from London. Until
Monday comes, there is nothing to be done but
to watch Mr. Blake carefully, and to keep him,
if possible, in the same state in which I find
him to-day.

In the meanwhile, I have prevailed on him
to write to Mr. Bruff, making a point of it
that he shall be present as one of the witnesses.
I especially choose the lawyer, because he is
strongly prejudiced against us. If we convince
him, we place our victory beyond the possibility
of dispute.

Mr. Blake has also written to Sergeant Cuff:
and I have sent a line to Miss Verinder. With
these, and with old Betteredge (who is really
a person of importance in the family) we shall
have witnesses enough for the purpose—without
including Mrs. Merridew, if Mrs. Merridew
persists in sacrificing herself to the opinion of
the world.

June 23rd.—The vengeance of the opium
overtook me again last night. No matter; I
must go on with it now till Monday is past and
gone.

Mr. Blake is not so well again to-day. At
two this morning, he confesses that he opened
the drawer in which his cigars are put away.
He only succeeded in locking it up again by a
violent effort. His next proceeding, in case of
accident, was to throw the key out of window.
The waiter brought it in this morning,
discovered at the bottom of an empty cistern—
such is Fate! I have taken possession of the
key, until Tuesday next.

June 24th.—Mr. Blake and I took a long
drive in an open carriage. We both felt
benefically the blessed influence of the soft summer
air. I dined with him at the hotel. To my
great relief—for I found him in an over- wrought,
over-excited state, this morning—he had two
hours' sound sleep on the sofa after dinner. If
he has another bad night, now—I am not afraid
of the consequences.

June 25th, Monday.—The day of the experiment!
It is five o'clock in the afternoon. We
have just arrived at the house.

   LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE.
        A SLICE OFF THE JOINT.

HOMER is a great authority on the question
how the Greeks of the heroic ages cooked
their meat. May we, therefore, be pardoned
if we stop on the threshold of our article to
make a remark or two about the probable
profession of " blind old Mæonides," before we
proceed to prove the poet's truly English
predilection for roast beef?

We have been recently informed, by our
wide-read and energetic friend Dreikopf, that
the learned world of Germany has, for the last
fifteen years, been literally torn to pieces by
a tremendous and apparently inexhaustible
controversy on this question carried on
between the sagacious Bopp of Jena, and the
erudite Klopp of Heidelberg. No old scholar
or young student but has taken his beer-glass
in one hand and his Homer in the other, and
ranged himself under the flaunting flag of
Klopp, or the blustering banner of Bopp.
The light of Jena contends, on the one part,
that Homer was a carcass-butcher at Chios;
while the luminary of Heidelberg argues, with
equal virulence, that the blind harper was a
house-surgeon at Smyrna.

A good deal of outward courtesy has hitherto
been maintained by both disputants; but in
secret, Dreikopf, who has visited both camps as
a strict neutral, confesses to us that there exists
much bitterness of feeling and less restraint of
temper than might have been expected between
two such great scholars.

Bopp says to his students, " How can this
fool, this BÅ“otian ox, deny that Homer never
speaks of the cutting up of meat without showing
a gusto, taste, and knowledge, unobtainable
by any one unless he had been a
practical butcher? Let the atrocious ass refer,
if he choose, to the Ninth Iliad, verse 270.
The ninnyhammer will there see that when a
Greek deputation is sent to Achilles to try
and win him back to the allied army, Patroclus
takes three chines (pig, sheep, and goat),
and transfixes and divides them with a
discriminating skill worthy of any flesh-market. Let
the swollen bull-frog of Heidelberg dulness also
turn, if he can read pure Greek well enough, to
the First Iliad, verse 600, where he will find
the Greeks who sacrifice the hecatomb to
appease Apollo, severing the thighs of the oxen
and wrapping choice morsels for the gods in the
double caul."

Such are a few of Bopp's learned arguments,
and Bopp is very convincing indeed until you
hear Klopp. That star of Heidelberg talks most
irreverently of his adversary. "Culmination of
pedantry!" he sometimes says, as if Bopp were
actually present in the lecture-room. " How can
he talk to me of butchers and such plebeian