own on to your face, and thus
discover whether your composure stood in need of further development or
no. My father gathered this from the writing that was pasted on to the
try-your-strength, but he had no time to go inside the shop and test
either the machine or his own temper. Other temptations to irritability
required the agency of living people, or at any rate living beings.
Crying children, screaming parrots, a spiteful monkey, might be hired on
ridiculously easy terms. He saw one advertisement, nicely framed, which
ran as follows:-

"Mrs. Tantrums, Nagger, certificated by the College of Spiritual
Athletics. Terms for ordinary nagging, two shillings and sixpence per
hour. Hysterics extra."

Then followed a series of testimonials--for example:-

"Dear Mrs. Tantrums,--I have for years been tortured with a husband of
unusually peevish, irritable temper, who made my life so intolerable
that I sometimes answered him in a way that led to his using personal
violence towards me. After taking a course of twelve sittings from
you, I found my husband's temper comparatively angelic, and we have
ever since lived together in complete harmony."

Another was from a husband:-

"Mr. --- presents his compliments to Mrs. Tantrums, and begs to assure
her that her extra special hysterics have so far surpassed anything
his wife can do, as to render him callous to those attacks which he
had formerly found so distressing."

There were many others of a like purport, but time did not permit my
father to do more than glance at them. He contented himself with the two
following, of which the first ran:-

"He did try it at last. A little correction of the right kind taken
at the right moment is invaluable. No more swearing. No more bad
language of any kind. A lamb-like temper ensured in about twenty
minutes, by a single dose of one of our spiritual indigestion
tabloids. In cases of all the more ordinary moral ailments, from
simple lying, to homicidal mania, in cases again of tendency to
hatred, malice, and uncharitableness; of atrophy or hypertrophy of the
conscience, of costiveness or diarrhoea of the sympathetic instincts,
&c., &c., our spiritual indigestion tabloids will afford unfailing and
immediate relief.

"_N.B_.--A bottle or two of our Sunchild Cordial will assist the
operation of the tabloids."

The second and last that I can give was as f