the sun, and is in a state of
profuse perspiration; you will have to bring him round with the
national beverage of Anglo-India, a brandy-and-soda.

Now he will enter upon your case. "Well, you're looking very blooming;
what the devil is the matter with you? Eh? Eh? Want a trip to the
hills? Eh? Eh? How is the bay pony? Eh? Have you seen Smith's new
filly? Eh?"

This is very cheerful and reassuring if you are a healthy man with
some large conspicuous disease--a broken rib, cholera, or toothache;
but if you are a fine, delicately-made man, pregnant with poetry as
the egg of the nightingale is pregnant with music, and throbbing with
an exquisite nervous sensibility, perhaps languishing under some vague
and occult disease, of which you are only conscious in moments of
intense introspection, this mode of approaching the diagnosis is apt
to give your system a shock.

Otherwise it may be bracing, like the inclement north wind. But,
speaking for myself, it has proved most ruinous and disastrous. Since
I have known the Doctor my constitution has broken up. I am a wreck.
There is hardly a single drug in the whole pharmacopoeia that I can
take with any pleasure, and I have entirely lost sight of a most
interesting and curious complaint.

You see, dear Vanity, that I don't mince matters. I take our Doctor as
I find him, rough and allopathic; but I am sure he might be improved
in the course of two or three generations. We may leave this, however,
to Nature and the Army Medical Department. Reform is not my business.
I have no proposals to offer that will accelerate the progress of the
Doctor towards a higher type.

Happily his surgical and medicinal functions claim only a portion of
his time. He is in charge of the district gaol, a large and
comfortable retreat for criminals. Here he is admirable. To some eight
or nine hundred murderers, robbers, and inferior delinquents he plays
the part of _maitre d'hotel_ with infinite success. In the whole
country side you will not find a community so well bathed, dressed,
exercised, fed and lodged as that over which the Doctor presides. You
observe on every face a quiet, Quakerish air of contentment. Every
inmate of the gaol seems to think that he has now found a haven of
rest.

If the sea-horse on the ocean
Own no dear domestic cave,
Yet he slumbers without motion
On the still and halcyon wave;
If on rainy days the loafer
Gamble when he cann