* * * * *

THE GUZZLING CURE.

[Sir DYCE DUCKWORTH, in a letter written to a Vegetarian Correspondent, says, “I believe in the value of animal food and alcoholic drinks for the best interests of man.  The abuse or misuse of either is another matter.”]

[Illustration]

  O plump Head-waiter, I have read
    What worthy DUCKWORTH writes! 
  And that is why I’ve swiftly sped
    To where your door invites. 
  I kept my indigestion down
    Of old, by sheer starvation;
  But now no longer shall I frown
    On food assimilation.

  I pledge him in your oldest port,
    This medical adviser,
  For vainly elsewhere might be sought
    A cheerier or a wiser,
  He bids me speedily return
    To ordinary diet—­
  A sage prescription!—­and I burn
    To chance results, and try it!

  I’ve lived on air; on food for Lent;
    On what some Doctor calls
  “Nitrogenous environment”—­
    A fare that quickly palls. 
  I’ll eat the chops I once did eat;
    All care and thought I banish;
  And with this unexpected treat
    My old dyspeptics vanish.

  What though they warn me that at first—­
    It may be merely fancy—­
  The stomach’s sure to try its worst
    In base recalcitrancy? 
  When half-starved gastric juice is set
    To cope with dainty dishes,
  The outcome—­one may safely bet—­
    Won’t be just what one wishes.

  This earth is rich in chemists’ shops,
    With doctors it abounds,
  Who, if I feel the change from slops,
    Will take me on their rounds. 
  So, scorning indigestive ache,
    I count each anxious minute;
  Oh, waiter, hurry up that steak! 
    My happiness is in it.

* * * * *

ANNALS OF A WATERING-PLACE

THAT “HAS SEEN ITS DAY.”

I do not know when Torsington-on-Sea’s day precisely was, or, whether indeed its day has yet dawned, but I was sent there by my medical adviser as being the very place for me, it being “delightfully quiet”, nine miles from a railway station, which apparently means in plain English twenty-four hours behind the rest of this habitable globe, and generally stranded in the race for every conceivable comfort or necessity with which an age of Co-operative Stores and Electric Lighting has made one comfortably—­perhaps too comfortably—­familiar.  Judging, however, from the fact that Torsington-on-Sea consists mainly of a pretentious architectural effort consisting of six-and-thirty palatial sea-side residences, twenty-four of which are let in sets of furnished apartments to highly respectable families, and twelve of which appear, from want of funds, to have stopped short in their infancy many years ago at the basement, showing a