ich had made him rather
uncomfortable. He had unfortunately made light of it and pooh-poohed the
ailment, until circumstances eventually presented themselves which
enabled him to cheat upon a very considerable scale;--he told me what
they were, and they were about as bad as anything could be, but I need
not detail them;--he seized the opportunity, and became aware, when it
was too late, that he must be seriously out of order. He had neglected
himself too long.

He drove home at once, broke the news to his wife and daughters as gently
as he could, and sent off for one of the most celebrated straighteners of
the kingdom to a consultation with the family practitioner, for the case
was plainly serious. On the arrival of the straightener he told his
story, and expressed his fear that his morals must be permanently
impaired.

The eminent man reassured him with a few cheering words, and then
proceeded to make a more careful diagnosis of the case. He inquired
concerning Mr. Nosnibor's parents--had their moral health been good? He
was answered that there had not been anything seriously amiss with them,
but that his maternal grandfather, whom he was supposed to resemble
somewhat in person, had been a consummate scoundrel and had ended his
days in a hospital,--while a brother of his father's, after having led a
most flagitious life for many years, had been at last cured by a
philosopher of a new school, which as far as I could understand it bore
much the same relation to the old as homoeopathy to allopathy. The
straightener shook his head at this, and laughingly replied that the cure
must have been due to nature. After a few more questions he wrote a
prescription and departed.

I saw the prescription. It ordered a fine to the State of double the
money embezzled; no food but bread and milk for six months, and a severe
flogging once a month for twelve. I was surprised to see that no part of
the fine was to be paid to the poor woman whose money had been embezzled,
but on inquiry I learned that she would have been prosecuted in the
Misplaced Confidence Court, if she had not escaped its clutches by dying
shortly after she had discovered her loss.

As for Mr. Nosnibor, he had received his eleventh flogging on the day of
my arrival. I saw him later on the same afternoon, and he was still
twinged; but there had been no escape from following out the
straightener's prescription, for the so-called sanitary laws of Erewhon
are