V
DOCTOR GRAESLER undertook his next visit to The Range not wholly unprepared. He had gathered together from his reminiscences all manner of things that might seem worth recounting, though at first, to be sure, he had been a trifle grieved at finding that a life which gave an outward appearance of having been moderately active should on closer scrutiny yield so very little in real content. At any rate there was here and there an event that might at least be made out to resemble an adventure. On a South Sea island, for instance, he had taken in a bit of a raid by the natives, and on this occasion a ship's-lieutenant had been killed. The suicide of a pair of lovers on the high seas; a cyclone in Indian waters; landing in a Japanese coast-town that had been destroyed by an earthquake the day before; a night in an opium-den, whose conclusion, to be sure, would have to be altered somewhat for recitation in the family circle—all this, he thought, might be spun out stimulatingly enough. Moreover, his memory had retained with sufficient clearness several of his patients in different watering-places—swindlers, odd characters, among them even a Russian grand-duke who had been murdered during the succeeding winter and had had a presentiment of his fate. And as he was leaning carelessly against the railing of the verandah at Schleheim's on a calm summer's evening and in response to a chance question of Karl's began to tell his stories, he noticed that many a faded reminiscence brightened and quickened in the telling and that many a long-forgotten incident came floating up out of the depths of his soul; and at moments he was even further amazed at a hitherto unfamiliar capacity for helping out his memory with bold invention whenever it threatened, now and again, to fail him. He was reconciled to this all the more easily because it allowed him to taste again the pleasure, long unenjoyed, of being
