ood
deal stimulated the interest with which a new arrival was commonly
looked for in that pleasant suburban village. There is no knowing how
long Lord Castlemallard might have prosed upon this theme, had he not
been accidentally cut short, and himself laid fast asleep in his chair,
without his or anybody else's intending it. For overhearing, during a
short pause, in which he sipped some claret, Surgeon Sturk applying some
very strong, and indeed, frightful language to a little pamphlet upon
magnetism, a subject then making a stir--as from a much earlier date it
has periodically done down to the present day--he languidly asked Dr.
Walsingham his opinion upon the subject.

Now, Dr. Walsingham was a great reader of out-of-the-way lore, and
retained it with a sometimes painful accuracy; and he forthwith began--

'There is, my Lord Castlemallard, a curious old tract of the learned Van
Helmont, in which he says, as near as I can remember his words, that
magnetism is a magical faculty, which lieth dormant in us by the opiate
of primitive sin, and, therefore, stands in need of an excitator, which
excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan
himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with
witches. The power, indeed, is in the witch, and not conferred by him;
but this versipellous or Protean impostor--these are his words--will not
suffer her to know that it is of her own natural endowment, though for
the present charmed into somnolent inactivity by the narcotic of
primitive sin.'

I verily believe that a fair description--none of your poetical
balderdash, but an honest plodding description of a perfectly
comfortable bed, and of the process of going to sleep, would,
judiciously administered soon after dinner, overpower the vivacity of
any tranquil gentleman who loves a nap after that meal--gently draw the
curtains of his senses, and extinguish the bed-room candle of his
consciousness. In the doctor's address and quotation there was so much
about somnolency and narcotics, and lying dormant, and opiates, that my
Lord Castlemallard's senses forsook him, and he lost, as you, my kind
reader, must, all the latter portion of the doctor's lullaby.

'I'd give half I'm pothethed of, Thir, and all my prothpecth in life,'
lisped vehemently plump little Lieutenant Puddock, in one of those stage
frenzies to which he was prone, 'to be the firtht Alecthander on the
boardth.'

Between ourselves, Puddoc