Ingersoll.
When I called, last Sunday afternoon, as was my habit, upon my old college friend—now a distinguished physician—I found him sitting in his office holding in his hand a letter. His manner was unusually grave and, I thought, troubled. I asked him, laughingly, if he had had bad news from beyond the seas—from his Castle in Spain.
"No, it is worse than that, I fear," he said gravely. "It looks to me very much like bad news from beyond the grave—from the Castle of Heredity in the realm of an Ancestor."
"I hope, doctor, that you have not had,—that my little jest was not a cruel touch upon a real hurt."
"Not at all, not at all, old fellow," he said, smiling a little.
"It is not my own trouble at all; but—well, it set me to thinking strange thoughts. Shall I tell you about it? I should really like to know just how it would impress you—an intelligent man out of the profession."
He placed the letter on the table beside him, looked at me steadily for a moment, and then began:
"It may be as well to say that I have never before ventured to tell the story of George Wetherell's curious experience, simply because I have always felt certain that to a really intelligent and well-in-formed physician it would be a comparatively familiar, and not specially startling (although a wholly uncomprehended) phase of human disorder; while to many, not of the profession, it would appear to involve such fearful and far-reaching results, that they would either refuse to believe it possible at all, or else jump to the conclusion that numerous cases which have only some slight point of similarity are to be classed with it and explained upon the same basis.
"In regard to these latter persons, I do not intend to convey the impression that I am either ambitious to shield them from the consequences of their own nimble and unguarded reckonings, or that by my silence in this particular instance I suppose that I have prevented them from forming quite as erroneous opinions founded upon some other equally misunderstood and ill-digested scrap of psychological and medical information.
"But it has sometimes seemed to me that there were certain features connected with the case of George Wetherell which, in the hands of the ignorant or unscrupulous, might easily be used to the disadvantage of their fellow-beings, and I have therefore hesitated to lay it before any one who was not, in my opinion, both intelligent and honorable enough to accept it as one of the strange manifestations in an individual experience; and to understand, because of the innumerable conditions of mental and physical heredity—which were not likely ever to occur again in the same proportions—that therefore the same manifestations were, not to be looked for in a sufficient number of persons to ever make this case in any sense a type or a guide.