The butler, John Binns, who is an old and faithful retainer to this household, is now suffering from his annual cough.  It is a terrific cough, capable of disputing supremacy with all other coughs of which the world has heard.  The special points about this cough are (1) its loudness; (2) its combination of the noises made by all other coughs; (3) its depth; (4) its shriek of despair as it trembles and reverberates through the house; (5) its capacity to repel and annihilate sympathy.  It is true that I have interviewed Binns with regard to his cough—­it is an annual interview and is expected of me.  I have urged him as he values our friendship not to neglect his cough, and he has assured me in return that the doctor has prepared for him a draught which possesses the supreme quality of being absolutely unable to effect the purpose for which it was devised.

“I shall drink ’is stuff,” says Binns, “but I ’aven’t any ’opes of its doing me any good.  It doesn’t seem to get me be’ind the eough.  If once I could really get be’ind it I should soon finish it.  But yon can’t expect to do anything with a cough unless you’re be’ind it.”

“Have you tried chloraline?” I venture to suggest, mentioning not by that name, but by another, a much-advertised specific.

“I’ve been living on chloraline—­that is when I wasn’t taking camphor lozenges.  But my symptoms are too strong for that kind o’ stuff.  Besides, I find that it’s no use to fill yerself up with remedies, because they only weigh down the cough unnaturally, and then when it does bust out it’s fit to tear yer throat in pieces.  But none of them get be’ind it—­no, not once.”

It will be observed that Binns has almost a superstition in regard to “getting be’ind.”  If he got rid of his cough with everything still in front, he would take no satisfaction whatever in his malady; but as it is he feels a legitimate pride in it.  He has been a member of this household for forty years, and punctually on the Kalends of March in every year his cough turns up.  It never reduces his efficiency, but, while it alienates affection, it makes him more valuable to himself as being one who has symptoms capable of being related at full length to Mrs. Hankinson, the cook, or to any of the maids who have not yet experienced it and must be made aware that they belong to an establishment which has the high merit of accommodating John Binns’s annual cough.

It is something to have a butler who has coughed his irresistible way through two-and-a-half generations.  It is a perfectly harmless affliction, but it gets on nerves in the same way as it did when first it huicked and honked and strangled and choked in the seventies of last century.  I can see no decrease in its vigour or its variety.  It deserves the chance of immortality that I hereby offer it, thus giving it a place beside the cough that Johnson coughed at Dr. Blimber’s famous establishment.  It will be remembered that, when the Doctor