Wheat to the north of them,
Grits to the south of them,
Into the Valley of Mush rode the two hundred.

* * * * *

Thursday

I was allowed to sit on my balcony for an hour this morning. This
would have been a pleasant change had I not heartily disliked at first
sight my next-door neighbor who was sitting on the adjoining balcony.
At noon she sent me a bunch of pansies and her card: Mrs. Grosvenor
Chittenden-Ffollette.

Among fifty or sixty attendants there are always a few who gossip in
spite of repeated warnings from the authorities. Sometimes it is a
young nurse, sometimes a masseuse, a manicure or a shampooer, but
there are always those who retail the news, mostly innocent news, of
an institution like this. Cold-packing, or rubbing, or spraying, or
electrifying, or brushing, or polishing--all these operations open the
flood-gates of speech and no damming process is effectual. Miss Phoebe
Blossom is the herald who proclaims tidings of various kinds in my
room, and there is also a neophyte in the electricity department who
is always full of information and quite unable to retain it. It would
be almost more than human to ask them to be silent when they are the
only links with the world outside. A system reduced to nothingness by
a supper of Wheatoata Coffee, Cracker-dust Croquettes, Cosmos with
milk, and a choice of Cerealina, Nuttetta, Proteinetta, or Glucosa is
in no fit state to resist gossip.

It seems that Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette is more than a mere woman--she
is a remarkable "case," and has proved a worldwide advertisement for
this sanitarium. Dr. Stanwood has almost effected a cure; her disease
has had to be named and her symptoms have been written up in all the
medical journals. I don't know what sort of person she was before she
became a case, but she is now a greater tyrant than Caligula or
Catherine of Russia. As to her disease, she has those things that she
ought not to have, and she has not those things that she ought to
have, and there is no health in her; or at least there was not until
she came here a year ago. Now she is strong enough to perambulate in
the corridor a little while each morning or be wheeled along the
board-walk in the afternoon, and when she hears that some of the other
patients are suffering, she sneers at their modest, uninteresting
ailments and glanc