amed in her countenance, begged me to
step into the next room and take something before I went out in the
cold,--a proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. Indignant at
the airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice
dispatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons,--fish, flesh,
fowl, pastry,--to the sprigs of garnishing parsley, and the last
fearful custard that quaked upon the board. I need not describe the
consternation, when in due time the dowagers adjourned from their
cards. Where was the supper?--and the servants' answer, Mr. ---- had
eat it all.--That freak, however, jested me out of a good three
hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was informed for a
certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in
illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for any
unlucky wag of a school-boy, with a tolerable appetite, could have
done as much without feeling any hurt after it,--only that you may
judge whether I am a man likely to set my talent to sale, or to
require the pitiful stimulus of a wager.

I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a reptile
in Africa, whose venom is of that hot, destructive quality, that
wheresoever it fastens its tooth, the whole substance of the animal
that has been bitten in a few seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles
away, and absolutely disappears: it is called, from this quality, the
Annihilator. Why am I forced to seek, in all the most prodigious and
portentous facts of Natural History, for creatures typical of myself?
_I am that snake, that Annihilator:_ "wherever I fasten, in a few
seconds----."

O happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that very
thing, the excess of which is my torment! O fortunate, too fortunate,
if you knew your happiness, invalids! What would I not give to
exchange this fierce concoctive and digestive heat,--this rabid fury
which vexes me, which tears and torments me,--for your quiet,
mortified, hermit-like, subdued, and sanctified stomachs, your cool,
chastened inclinations and coy desires for food!

To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this
unnatural craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the physicians
to determine: they, like the rest of the world, have doubtless their
eye upon me; and as I have been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my
friends, so I shudder when I contemplate the probability that this
animal frame, when its restless appetites shall have ce