Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter, this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of all his illnesses.
He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail.

The doctor, who took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to move.

No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate.

One letter to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident.

This well-to- do young guest was worth nursing.