anyone hope to sleep in peace
after that? As to your digestion, no one has a digestion who is in the
doctor's hands. They prescribe from dogmas, and don't count on the
system. They have cut you down from two bottles to two glasses. It's
absurd. You can't sleep, because your system is crying out for what it's
accustomed to."

Hippias sips his Madeira with a niggerdly confidence, but assures Adrian
that he really should not like to venture on a bottle now: it would be
rank madness to venture on a bottle now, he thinks. Last night only,
after partaking, under protest, of that rich French dish, or was it the
duck?--Adrian advised him to throw the blame on that vulgar bird.--Say
the duck, then. Last night, he was no sooner stretched in bed, than he
seemed to be of an enormous size all his limbs--his nose, his mouth, his
toes--were elephantine! An elephant was a pigmy to him. And his
hugeousness seemed to increase the instant he shut his eyes. He turned on
this side; he turned on that. He lay on his back; he tried putting his
face to the pillow; and he continued to swell. He wondered the room could
hold him--he thought he must burst it--and absolutely lit a candle, and
went to the looking-glass to see whether he was bearable.

By this time Adrian and Richard were laughing uncontrollably. He had,
however, a genial auditor in the Eighteenth Century, who declared it to
be a new disease, not known in her day, and deserving investigation. She
was happy to compare sensations with him, but hers were not of the
complex order, and a potion soon righted her. In fact, her system
appeared to be a debatable ground for aliment and medicine, on which the
battle was fought, and, when over, she was none the worse, as she
joyfully told Hippias. Never looked ploughman on prince, or village belle
on Court Beauty, with half the envy poor nineteenth-century Hippias
expended in his gaze on the Eighteenth. He was too serious to note much
the laughter of the young men.

This 'Tragedy of a Cooking-Apparatus,' as Adrian designated the malady of
Hippias, was repeated regularly ever evening. It was natural for any
youth to escape as quick as he could from such a table of stomachs.

Adrian bore with his conduct considerately, until a letter from the
baronet, describing the house and maternal System of a Mrs. Caroline
Grandison, and the rough grain of hopefulness in her youngest daughter,
spurred him to think of his duties, and see what was going on. He