did. Away
went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and with
the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices. He vowed he was the
man. Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his tender
parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten nothing
whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized on him
in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the surgery,
knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the felicity of
exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under dissecting
hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for him. All
to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all the
scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be no such empirical
science.

Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy. He brought it home to Beaves
Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it. Yet the orator
was asked: 'Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'

He countered his questioner: 'Just to liberate you from your moribund
state, my friend.' And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit for
interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
feathers, and shouting: 'Polly tho dram dry!'--which struck on the nob of
Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
cried; 'That did it! Now to business!' for he was hungry. 'And when I
catch the ring of this world's laugh from you, my friend . . . !'
Simeon's application of the story was drowned.

After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: 'You keep
that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the old
widow woman for her money, Simmy!'

Victor leaned forward. Simeon towered. He bellowed

'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!'

It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre. The man went under. Simeon
flowed. Conscience reproached him with the little h