cunning little
gold-tipped caps or reinforced concrete suspension-bridges for me. Out it
comes. Blood and iron every time). I admit they frequently appease my
anguish. Almost invariably among the teeth of which they relieve me at each
sitting is included the offending one. But still I maintain my right to
have a say in my own afflictions. The doctors let one. I've got a physician
who lets me have any disease I fancy (except German measles and Asiatic
cholera; for patriotic reasons he won't hear a good word spoken for either
of them; says we've got just as good diseases of our own. Damned
insularity!).

If I send for this doctor he comes along, sits quietly beside my bed,
eating my grapes, while I tell him where the pain isn't. The recital over
he hands me a selection of ailments to pick from. I choose one. He tells me
what the symptoms are, drinks my invalid port, creeps downstairs and breaks
the news to the hushed and awe-stricken family. A chap like that makes
suffering a pleasure and is a great comfort in a home like mine, where a
sick bed is the only sort you are allowed to lie in after 10 A.M. Without
the fellow's ready sympathy I doubt if I should secure any sleep at all.
One gets no assistance of that kind from dentists, although they give you
more pain in ten seconds than a doctor does in ten years.

No dentist ever sees me home after the slaughter, orders me a diet of
chicken breast, _peche Melba_ and champagne, or warns my family that I am
on no account to be disturbed until lunch. No, they jerk your jaw off its
hinges and dump your remains on the doorstep for the L.C.C. rubbish cart to
collect.

Another thing: dentists should not be allowed out loose about the streets.
They exercise a blighting influence. You are strolling along in the
sunshine, head high, chest expanded, telling some wide-eyed young thing
what you and HAIG did to LUDENDORFF, when suddenly you meet the dentist.
You look at him, he looks at you, and his eyes seem to say, "What ho, my
hero! Last week you went to ground under my sofa and couldn't be dislodged
until I put the page-boy in to ferret you."

"And what happened then," inquires the wide-eyed young thing, "after you
had caught the Hun tank by the tail and ripped it up with a tin-opener?"

"After that," says the eye of the dentist, "you wept, you prayed, you lay
on the floor and kicked, you--"

"And did you kill all the crew yourself?" bleats the maiden, "single-handed
--every one