fection, the 'salmi des perdreaux, aux points d'asperges,' delicious, and the 'ortolans à la provençale' a dish for the gods; while the wines were of that cru and flavour that only favoured individuals ever attained to at the hands of a landlord. As plat succeeded plat, each admirably selected in the order of succession to heighten the enjoyment and gratify the palate of the guest, the conversation took its natural turn to matters gastronomic, and where, I must confess, I can dally with as sincere pleasure as in the discussion of any other branch of the fine arts. Mr. Crotty's forte seemed essentially to lie in the tact of ordering and arranging a very admirable repast. Wycherley, however, took a higher walk; he was historically gastronome, and had a store of anecdotes about the dishes and their inventors, from Clovis to Louis Quatorze. He knew the favourite meats of many illustrious personages, and told his stories about them with an admirable blending of seriousness and levity.

There are excellent people, Arthur, who will call you sensualist for all this-good souls, who eat like Cossacks and drink like camels in the desert; before whose masticatory powers joints become beautifully less in shortest space of time, and who while devouring in greedy silence think nothing too severe to say of him who, with more cultivated palate and discriminating taste, eats sparingly but choicely, making the nourishment of his body the nutriment of his mind, and while he supports nature, can stimulate his imagination and invigorate his understanding. The worthy votaries of boiled mutton and turnips, of ribs and roasts, believe themselves temperate and moderate eaters, while consuming at a meal the provender sufficient for a family; and when, after an hour's steady performance, they sit with hurried breathing and half-closed eyelids, sullen, stupid, and stertorous, drowsy and dull, saturated with stout and stuffed with Stilton, they growl out a thanksgiving that they are not like other men-epicures and wine-bibbers. Out upon them, I say! Let me have

my light meal, be its limits a cress, and the beverage that ripples from the rock beside me; but be it such, that, while eating, there is no transfusion of the beast devoured into the man, nor, when eaten, the semi-apoplectic stupor of a gorged boa!

Sir Harry did the honours of the table, and sustained the burden of the conversation, to which Crotty contributed but little, the young man and myself being merely noneffectives; nor did we separate until the garçon came to warn us that the Saal was about to close for the night.

CHAPTER XXV

A WATERING-PLACE DOCTOR

NOTHING is more distinct than the two classes of people who are to be met with in the morning and in the afternoon, sauntering along the allées of a German wateringplace. The former are the invalid portion, poured forth in numbers from hotel and lodging-house; attired in every absurdity of dressing-room toilette, with woollen nightcaps and flannel jackets, old-fashioned douillettes and morocco slippers, they glide along, glass in hand, to some sulphur spring, or to repose for an hour or two in the delights of a mud bath. For the most part, they are the old and the feeble, pale of face and tottering in step. The pursuit of health with them would seem a vain and fruitless effort; the machine appears to have run its destined time, and all the skill of man is unavailing to repair it. Still, hope survives when strength and youth have failed, and the very grouping together in their gathering-places has its consolation; while the endless diversity of malady gives an interest in the eye of a sick man.

This may seem strange, but it is nevertheless perfectly true. There is something which predisposes an invalid to all narratives of illness; they are the topics he dwells

on with most pleasure, and discourses about with most eagerness. The anxiety for the 'gentleman next door' is neither philanthropy, nor is it common curiosity. No, it is perfectly distinct from either; it is the deep interest in the course of symptoms, in the ups and downs of chance; it is compounded of the feelings which animate the physician and those which fill the invalid. And hence we see that the severest sufferings of their neighbours make less impression on the minds of such people than on those in full health. It is not from apathy nor selfishness they are seemingly indifferent, but simply because they regard the question in a different light: to take an illustration from the gaming-table, they have too deep an interest in the game itself to feel greatly for the players. The visit of the doctor is to them the brightest moment of the day; not only the messenger of good tidings to the patient, he has a thousand little bits of sick-room gossip, harmless, pointless trifles, but all fraught with their own charm to the greedy ear of the sick man. It is so pleasant to know how Mrs. W. bore her drive, or Sir Arthur liked his jelly; what Mrs. T. said when they ordered her to be bled, and whether dear Mr. H. would consent to the blister. And with what consummate tact your watering-place doctor doles out the infinitesimal doses of his morning's intelligence! How different his visit from the hurried flight of a West-End practitioner, who, while he holds his watch in hand, counts the minutes of his stay while he feels your pulse, and whose descent downstairs is watched by a cordon of the household, catching his directions as he goes, and learning his opinion as he springs into his chariot ! Your Spa doctor has a very different mission; his are no heroic remedies, which taken to-day are to cure tomorrow; his character is tried by no subtle test of immediate success; his patients come for a term, or, to use the proper phrase, for a course of the waters -then they are condemned to chalybeates for a quarter

of the year, so many glasses per diem. With their health, properly speaking, he has no concern; his function is merely an inspection that the individual drinks his fluid regularly, and takes his mud like a man. The patient is invoiced to him, with a bill of lading from Bell or Brodie; he has full information of the merchandise transmitted, and the mode in which the consignee desires. it may be treated-out of this ritual he must not move. The great physician of the West End says, 'Bathe and drink'; and his chargé d'affaires at Wiesbaden takes care to see his orders obeyed. As well might a forçat at Brest or Toulon hope to escape the punishment described in the catalogue of prisoners, as for a patient to run counter to the remedies thus arranged, and communicated by post. Occasionally changes will take place in a sick man's condition en route which alter the applicability of his treatment; but, then, what would you have? Brodie and Chambers are not prophets; divination and augury are not taught in the London and Middlesex hospitals!

I remember, myself, a marquis of gigantic proportions, who had kept his prescription by him from the time of his being a stripling till he weighed twenty stone. The fault here lay not with the doctor. The bath he was to take contained some powerful ingredient-a preparation of iron, I believe; well, he got into it, and immediately began swelling and swelling out, till, big as he was before, he was now twice the size, and at last, like an overheated boiler, threatened to explode with a crash. What was to be done? To lift him was out of the question-he fitted the bath like a periwinkle in its shell; and in this dilemma no other course was open than to decant him, water and all-which was performed, to the very considerable mirth of the bystanders.

The Spa doctor, then, it will be seen, moves in a very narrow orbit. He must manage to sustain his reputation without the aid of the pharmacopoeia, and continue to be imposing without any assistance from the dead languages.

Hard conditions! but he yields to them, like a man of

nerve.

He begins, then, by extolling the virtues of the waters, which by analysis of 'his own making,' and set forth in a little volume published by himself, contain very different properties from those ascribed to them by others. He explains most clearly to his non-chemical listener how 'pure silica found in combination with oxide of iron, at a temperature of thirty-nine and a half, Fahrenheit,' must necessarily produce the most beneficial effects on the knee-joint; and he describes, with all the ardour of science, the infinite satisfaction the nerves must experience when invigorated by 'free carbonic gas' sporting about in the system. Day by day he indoctrinates the patient into some stray medical notion, giving him an interest in his own anatomy, and putting him on terms of familiar acquaintance with the formation of his heart or his stomach. This flatters the sick man, and, better still, it occupies his attention. He himself thus becomes a particeps in the first degree to his own recovery; and the simplicity of treatment, which had at first no attractions for his mind, is now complicated with so many little curious facts about the blood and the nerves, mucous membranes and muscles, as fully to compensate for any lack of mystery, and is in truth just as unintelligible as the most involved inconsistency of any written prescription. Besides this, he has another object which demands his attention. Plain, common-sense people, who know nothing of physic or its mysteries, might fall into the fatal error of supposing that the wells so universally employed by the people of the country for all purposes of washing, bathing, and cooking, however impregnated by mineral properties, were still by no means so capable, in proportions of great power and efficacy, of effecting either very decided results, curative or noxious. The doctor must set his heel on this heresy at once; he must be able to show how a sip too much or a half-glass too many can produce the gravest