aid Pyecraft.

I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort and fell
flat within me. "What in Heaven's name, Pyecraft," I asked, "do you think
you'll look like when you get thin?"

He was impervious to reason, I made him promise never to say a word to me
about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened--never, and then I
handed him that little piece of skin.

"It's nasty stuff," I said.

"No matter," he said, and took it.

He goggled at it. "But--but--" he said

He had just discovered that it wasn't English.

"To the best of my ability," I said, "I will do you a translation."

I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight. Whenever he
approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected our
compact, but at the end of the fortnight he was as fat as ever. And then
he got a word in.

"I must speak," he said, "It isn't fair. There's something wrong. It's
done me no good. You're not doing your great-grandmother justice."

"Where's the recipe?"

He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.

I ran my eye over the items. "Was the egg addled?" I asked.

"No. Ought it to have been?"

"That," I said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is not specified
you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing... And there's one or
two possible alternatives to some of these other things. You got _fresh_
rattlesnake venom?"

"I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost--it cost----"

"That's your affair anyhow. This last item----"

"I know a man who----"

"Yes. H'm. Well, I'll write the alternatives down. So far as I know the
language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.
By-the-by, dog here probably means pariah dog."

For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and as fat
and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke the spirit
of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day in the cloakroom he
said, "Your great-grandmother----"

"Not a word against her," I said; and he held his peace.

I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking to
three new members about his fatness as though he was in search of other
recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.

"Mr. Formalyn!" bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took the telegram
and opened it at once.

"_For Heaven's sake come_.--_Pyecraft_."

"H'm," said I, and to tel