Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. Next to a church in one of the cross streets in the upper part of New York, near the Park, there stands, or stood, a mysterious-looking house defended from public observation by a high gray-stone wall, after the manner of many residences in London. The house was inhabited by Dr. Lone- castle, a man of about thirty-five years of age, who had made a great reputation by his management of diseases of the brain and nerves, and whose monograph, entitled
Occult Treatment in Madness
(which, however, did not profess to be a scientific treatise), had gained for him a repute from which he afterwards shrank. During his wonderfully industrious and lucrative career he had found time, even at that early age,besides scientific works, to make translations from Greek and Latin authors who arc known only by name to most students familiar with those tongues. It was plain that he devoted much of his time to something besides his profession, and since none of these occupations were visible to the world, the world avenged itself by ascribing to him uncanny pursuits that would not bear inspection. In this old-fashioned and secluded house Dr. Lonecastle had desired to almost wholly give up practice. He would have given it up entirely had he not realized how nearly impossible it was for a popular physician to rid himself of the claims of his profession. He resorted to the expedient of making his fees so large that only the few consented to give them, and even then he found his hours encroached on more than he willed. It was nearly midnight of a desolate December day, toward the latter part of themonth. No snow had fallen, but the weather was intensely cold, and bleak winds whistled around the corners and under the broad eaves of the old house, and shook the branches of the great trees that…