was
speaking--Samuel Epigastric Joplin, his brother painters called him.
"You treat your stomach as if it were a scrap-basket and you dump into
it everything you--"

"I do? You caricature of a codfish ball!"

"Yes, you do. You open your mouth, pin back your ears and in go
pickles, red cabbage, Dutch cheese. It's insanity, Marny, and it's
vulgar. No man's epigastric can stand it. It wouldn't make any
difference if you were a kangaroo with your pouch on the outside, but
you're a full-grown man and ought to have some common-sense."

"And you think that if I followed your idiotic theory it would keep me
out of my coffin, do you? What you want, Joppy, is a square meal. You
never had one, so far as I can find out, since you were born. You drank
sterilized milk at blood temperature until you were five; chewed
patent, unhulled wheat bread until you were ten, and since that time
you've filled your stomach with husks--proteids, and carbohydrates, and
a lot of such truck--isn't that what he calls em, Pudfut?"

The Englishman nodded in assent.

"And now just look at you, Joppy, instead of a forty-inch chest--"

"And a sixty-inch waist," interjected Joplin with a laugh, pointing at
Marny's waistcoat.

"I acknowledge it, old man, and I'm proud of it," retorted Marny,
patting his rotundity. "Instead, I say, of a decent chest your
shoulders crowd your breast-bone; your epigastric, as you call it--it's
your solar plexus, Joppy--but that's a trifle to an anatomist like
you--your epigastric scrapes your back-bone, so lonely is it for
something warm and digestible to rub up against, and your-- Why, Joppy,
do you know when I look at you and think over your wasted life, my eyes
fill with tears? Eat something solid, old man, and give your stomach a
surprise. Begin now. Dinner's coming up--I smell it. Open your port
nostril, you shrivelled New England bean, and take in the aroma of
beatific pork and greens. Doesn't that put new life into you? Puddy,
you and Schonholz help Joppy to his feet and one or two of you fellows
walk behind to pick up the pieces in case he falls apart before we can
feed him. There's Tine's dinner-bell!"

White-capped, rosy-checked, bare-armed Tine had rung that bell for this
group of painters for two years past--ever since Mynheer Boudier of the
Bellevue over the way, who once claimed her services, had reproved
Johann, the porter, for blocking up with the hotel trunks that part of
the sidewalk over which the s