would have suited me perfectly, but this process of human moulting
is horrible to witness; and so, say I once more, _En route_.

Like a Dutchman who took a run of three miles to jump over a hill, and
then sat down tired at the foot of it, I flurried myself so completely
in canvassing all the possible places I might, could, would, should, or
ought to pass the winter in, that I actually took a fortnight to recover
my energies before I could set out.

Meanwhile I had made a close friendship with a dyspeptic countryman of
mine, who went about the Continent with a small portmanteau and a very
large medicine-chest, chasing health from Naples to Paris, and from
Aix-la-Chapelle to Wildbad, firmly persuaded that every country had only
one month in the year at most wherein it were safe to live there--Spa
being the appropriate place to pass the October. He cared nothing for
the ordinary topics that engross the attention of mankind; kings might
be dethroned and dynasties demolished; states might revolt and subjects
be rebellious--all he wanted to know was, not what changes were made
in the code but in the pharmacopoeia. The liberty of the Press was a
matter of indifference to him; he cared little for what men might say,
but a great deal for what it was safe to swallow, and looked upon the
inventor of blue-pill as the greatest benefactor of mankind. He had the
analysis of every well and spring in Germany at his fingers' end, and
could tell you the temperature and atomic proportions like his alphabet.
But his great system was a kind of reciprocity treaty between health and
sickness, by which a man could commit any species of gluttony he pleased
when he knew the peculiar antagonist principle. And thus he ate--I was
going to say like a shark, but let me not in my ignorance calumniate the
fish; for I know not if anything that ever swam could eat a soup with
a custard pudding, followed by beef and beetroot, stewed mackerel
and treacle, pickled oysters and preserved cherries, roast hare and
cucumber, venison, salad, prunes, hashed mutton, omelettes, pastry, and
finally, to wind up with effect, a sturgeon baked with brandy-peaches in
his abdomen--a thing to make a cook weep and a German blessed. Such was
my poor friend, Mr. Bartholomew Cater, the most thin, spare, emaciated,
and miserable-looking man that ever sipped at Schwalbach or shivered at
Kissingen.

To permit these extravagances in diet, however, he had concocted a code
of repri