The Doctor andc - v. 1 Author:Robert Southey 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: THE DOCTOR, CHAPTER VII. A. I. A FAMILY PARTY AT A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S. Good sir, reject it not, although it bring Appearances of some fantastic thing... more » At Ural unfolding! Geoboe Wither to the King. I Was in the fourth night of the story of the doctor and his horse, and had broken it off, not like Scheherezade because it was time to get up, but because it was time to go to bed. It was at thirty-five minutes after ten o'clock, on the 20th of July, in the year of our Lord 1813. I finished my glass of punch, tinkled the spoon against its side, as if making music to my meditations, and having my eyes fixed upon the Bhow Begum, who was sitting opposite to me at the head of her own table, I said, " It ought to be written in a book!" There had been a heavy thunder storm in the afternoon; and though the thermometer had fallen from 78 to 70, still the atmosphere was charged. If that mysterious power by which the nerves convey sensation and make their impulses obeyed be (as experiments seem to indicate) identical with the galvanic fluid; and if the galvanic and electric fluids be the same, (as philosophers have more than surmised;) and if the lungs (according to a happy hypothesis) elaborate for us from the light of heaven this pabulum of the brain, and material essence, or essential matter of genius, it may be that the ethereal fire which 1 had inhaled so largely during the day produced the bright conception, or at least impregnated and quickened the latent seed. The punch, reader, had no share in it. I had spoken as it were abstractedly, and the look which accompanied the words was rather cogitative than regardant.The Show Begum laid down her snuffbox and replied, entering into the feeling, as well as echoing the words, " It ought to be written in a book—certainly it...« less