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“BEROOFEN!”

“Well,” quoth the Baron DE BOOK-WORMS, as he sat down to dinner on a Friday, a week ago, “I must say I have never, never been better in my life!  Why, dear me, it is quite a year since I was ill!”

“Beroofen!” exclaimed an Italian Countess of dazzling beauty, at the same time rapping the table with one of the bejewelled forks which form part of the Baron’s second-best dinner-service.

“Why ’Beroofen’?” asked the Baron.

“It is a spell against the consequences of boasting,” the lady explained.  “My mother was a bit of a magician.”

“And you, my dear Countess, are bewitching.  Your health!” And, pledging her, the Baron drank off a bumper of Pommery ’80 tres sec, and laughed joyously at the notion of his rapping the table—­all “table-rapping” being a past superstition, or supperstition when not at dinner,—­and murmuring, “Beroofen!” And so he didn’t do it. “Beroofen” never passed his lips:  the champagne did; but not “Beroofen.”

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[Illustration]

“Ugh I—­I feel so shivery-and-livery.  Ugh!—­so chilly.  Here!  Send for Dr. ROBSON ROOSTEM PASHA!” cried the Baron, clapping his hands, and a thousand ebon slaves bounded off to execute his commands.  Had they not done so, they themselves might have suffered the fate intended for the commands, and have themselves been rapidly executed.

* * * * *

“You’ve got ’em,” quoth Dr. ROBSON ROOSTEM PASHA.

“Not ’again’!” cried the Baron, surprised, never having had ’em before.

“No:  the phenomena,” said the Eminent Medico.

“Have I?” murmured the Baron, and sank down into his uneasy chair.  It was an awful thing to have the Phenomena.  It might have been the measles in Greek.  Anything but that!  Anything but that!  But Dr. ROOSTEM explained that “phenomena” is not Greek for measles, though perhaps Phenomenon might be Greek for “one measle;” but this would be singular, very singular.

“I must tap you,” continued the friend-in-need.  “No—­no—­don’t be alarmed.  When I say ‘tap,’ I mean sound you.”

Then he began the woodpecking business.  In the character of Dr. Woodpecker he tapped at the hollow oak chest, sounded the Baron’s heart of oak, pronounced him true to the core, whacked him, smacked him, insisted upon his calling out “Ninety-nine,” in various tones, so that it sounded like a duet to the old words, without much of the tune—­

  “I’m ninety-nine,
  I’m ninety-nine!”

the remainder of which the Baron had never heard, even in his earliest childhood.

So it was a quarter of an hour of inspiration, musical and poetic, and, at its expiration, Dr. MARK TAPLEY, as the Baron declared he must henceforth be called, announced that there was nothing for it but to make the Baron a close prisoner in his own castle, where he would have to live up to the mark, as if he were to be shown, a few months hence, at a prize cattle-show, among other Barons of Beef.