lated on the watercress-beds, while Mrs. Jablett regarded me
expectantly with a dim and watery eye.

"Ah!" I said at length; "it's your--your inside, is it, Mrs. Jablett?"

"Yus. _And_ my 'ead," she added, with a voluminous sigh that filled
the apartment with odorous reminiscences of "unsweetened."

"Your head aches, does it?"

"Somethink chronic!" said Mrs. Jablett. "Feels as if it was a-opening
and a-shutting, a-opening and a-shutting, and when I sit down I feel as
if I should _bust_."

This picturesque description of her sensations--not wholly inconsistent
with her figure--gave the clue to Mrs. Jablett's sufferings. Resisting
a frivolous impulse to reassure her as to the elasticity of the human
integument, I considered her case in exhaustive detail, coasting
delicately round the subject of "unsweetened" and finally sent her
away, revived in spirits and grasping a bottle of Mist. Sodae cum
Bismutho from Barnard's big stock-jar. Then I went back to investigate
the Horrible Discovery; but before I could open the paper, another
patient arrived (_Impetigo contagiosa_, this time, affecting the "wide
and arched-front sublime" of a juvenile Fetter Laner), and then yet
another, and so on through the evening until at last I forgot the
watercress-beds altogether. It was only when I had purified myself
from the evening consultations with hot water and a nail-brush and was
about to sit down to a frugal supper, that I remembered the newspaper
and fetched it from the drawer of the consulting-room table, where it
had been hastily thrust out of sight. I folded it into a convenient
form, and, standing it upright against the water-jug, read the report
at my ease as I supped.

There was plenty of it. Evidently the reporter had regarded it as a
"scoop," and the editor had backed him up with ample space and
hair-raising head-lines.

"HORRIBLE DISCOVERY
IN A WATERCRESS-BED
AT SIDCUP!"

"A startling discovery was made yesterday afternoon in the course of
clearing out a watercress-bed near the erstwhile rural village of
Sidcup in Kent; a discovery that will occasion many a disagreeable
qualm to those persons who have been in the habit of regaling
themselves with this refreshing esculent. But before proceeding to a
description of the circumstances of the actual discovery or of the
objects found--which, however, it may be stated at once, are nothing
more or less than the fragments of a dismembered human body--it will