with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which
commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate
breakfast, four dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered
toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the
most easily digested. Immediately afterward you sit down to write at
your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus
the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise.

But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary
condition. But what is your practise after dinner? Walking in the
beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be
the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixt down to chess, where
you are found engaged for two or three hours! This is your perpetual
recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary man,
because, instead of accelerating the motion of the fluids, the rigid
attention it requires helps to retard the circulation and obstruct
internal secretions. Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game,
you destroy your constitution. What can be expected from such a course
of living but a body replete with stagnant humors, ready to fall a
prey to all kinds of dangerous maladies, if I, the Gout, did not
occasionally bring you relief by agitating those humors, and so
purifying or dissipating them? If it was in some nook or alley in
Paris, deprived of walks, that you played awhile at chess after
dinner, this might be excusable; but the same taste prevails with you
in Passy, Auteuil, Montmartre, or Sanoy, places where there are the
finest gardens and walks, a pure air, beautiful women, and most
agreeable and instructive conversation; all which you might enjoy by
frequenting the walks. But these are rejected for this abominable game
of chess. Fie, then, Mr. Franklin! But amidst my instructions, I had
almost forgot to administer my wholesome corrections; so take that
twinge--and that.

_Franklin._ Oh! Eh! Oh! Ohhh! As much instruction as you please, Madam
Gout, and as many reproaches; but pray, Madam, a truce with your
corrections!

_Gout._ No, Sir, no--I will not abate a particle of what is so much
for your good--therefore--

_Franklin._ Oh! Ehhh!--It is not fair to say I take no exercise, when
I do very often, going out to dine and returning in my carriage.

_Gout._ That, of all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and
insignificant, if you allude to the motion of a carria