Mice man or Christ man,

So long as you’re a nice man —

but Jessica wouldn’t let him get any further. She thought it was blasphemous, and even more urgently wondered what Teddy would go home and tell his father.

I daresay I was too old, when I first met him, ever to know the little doctor in this childlike and more elemental sense. I was twelve and had for years suffered from recurring bouts of asthma. Other doctors had grown tired of me; patent medicines had been tried in vain. So I went at last to David, and it was then, one summer evening, that I watched the sunlight climb the counties over the map. When my turn came I sat in the leather armchair that had a footrest and a swivel arrangement for tilting backwards, and described (as clearly as only a bright grammar-school boy can) exactly what was the matter with me. Was it very serious? Would I ever get better? Was there a cure?

“I don’t really know,” David said (it was one of the things which a doctor should never say and which David often said), and after looking puzzled for a moment added: “But I think you ought to keep a diary.”

“I do,” I answered, rather proudly.

“And do you put in it everywhere you go every day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you must go on doing that, and you must also put down how the asthma is every day … Do you like detective stories?”

I said I did, and he lent me Trent’s Last Case.

For two months I kept that diary, noting each day where I went and how much better or worse I was. Then I went to see him again. “Ah,” he said, “now we can behave as if we were from Scotland Yard. A crime has been committed and we must look for clues. I see that on April nineteenth, after visiting your Uncle Richard, you had a particularly bad attack. Now what’s your hypothesis?”

That was just how a boy of twelve, and top of his class, liked to be talked to; and in less than a week a theory was formulated. Just cats. Uncle Richard had a cat, and so had other people whom I knew and visited; I liked cats and always fondled them at every opportunity. But David wasn’t satisfied till he had taken me to Chancey Gardens.

Chancey was a place about fifty miles away where there were, and perhaps still are, side shows, a small zoo, and an amusement park. The expedition required a whole day, and it seemed remarkable, to others much more than to me, that David should hand over his affairs to a colleague in order to give a schoolboy an outing. But we had a good time. We tried the merry-go-round and the test-your-strength machines, and afterwards we ate ice-cream out of penny cones. Then we looked in at the lion house, where I promptly began to sneeze and gasp for breath. “You see?” David said, quite pleased with himself. “Any of the cat tribe, apparently … now that’s very remarkable …”