“Bubbleton is an old friend of yours,” continued the doctor. And then, without giving me time to reply, added, “Capital fellow,—no better; a little given to the miraculous, eh? but nothing worse.”
“Why, he does indeed seem to have a strong vein for fiction,” said I, half timidly.
“Bless your heart, he never ceases. His world is an ideal thing, fall of impossible people and events, where he has lived at least some centuries, enjoying the intimacies of princes, statesmen, poets, and warriors. He has, in his own estimation, unlimited wealth and unbounded resources, the want of which he is never convinced of till pressed for five shillings to buy his dinner.”
“And his sister,” said I; “what of her?”
“Just as strange a character in the opposite direction. She is as matter of fact as he is imaginative. To all his flights she as resolutely enters a dissentient; and he never inflates his balloon of miracles without her stepping forward to punch a hole in it. But here they come.”
“I say. Pepper, how goes your patient? Spare no pains, old fellow,—no expense; only get him round. I've left a cheque for you for five hundred in the next room. This is no regimental case; come, come! it 's my way, and I insist upon it.”
Pepper bowed with an air of the deepest gratitude, and actually looked so overpowered by the liberality that I began to suspect there might be less truth in his account of Bubbleton than I thought a few minutes before.
“All insanity has left him,—that's pleasant. I say, Tom, you must have had glorious thoughts, eh? When you were mad, did you ever think you were an anaconda bolting a goat, or the Eddystone Lighthouse when the foundation began to shift?”
“No, never.”
“How odd! I remember being once thrown on my head off a drag. I was breaking in a pair of young unicorns for the Queen of—”