rved gastric juice is set
To cope with dainty dishes,
The outcome--one may safely bet--
Won't be just what one wishes.

This earth is rich in chemists' shops,
With doctors it abounds,
Who, if I feel the change from slops,
Will take me on their rounds.
So, scorning indigestive ache,
I count each anxious minute;
Oh, waiter, hurry up that steak!
My happiness is in it.

* * * * *

ANNALS OF A WATERING-PLACE

THAT "HAS SEEN ITS DAY."

I do not know when Torsington-on-Sea's day precisely was, or, whether
indeed its day has yet dawned, but I was sent there by my medical
adviser as being _the very place_ for me, it being "delightfully
quiet", nine miles from a railway station, which apparently means
in plain English twenty-four hours behind the rest of this habitable
globe, and generally stranded in the race for every conceivable
comfort or necessity with which an age of Co-operative Stores
and Electric Lighting has made one comfortably--perhaps too
comfortably--familiar. Judging, however, from the fact that
Torsington-on-Sea consists mainly of a pretentious architectural
effort consisting of six-and-thirty palatial sea-side residences,
twenty-four of which are let in sets of furnished apartments to highly
respectable families, and twelve of which appear, from want of funds,
to have stopped short in their infancy many years ago at the basement,
showing a weed-covered foundation of what might, had the over-sanguine
capitalist not overshot the initial mark, have proved as fine a
sea-side terrace on the South East Coast as the weary cockney eye
could well hope to light upon, it would be including the fact that
there is but one policeman to protect the lives and properties of the
inhabitants and strangers of Torsington-on-Sea, by day and by night,
and a town band (with a uniform) of five, of which two-fifths are, I
was going to say "armed" with cymbals, triangle and with big and side
drums, it would be more reasonable to suppose that Torsington-on-Sea
had seen its day, and that what glories it ever had may be regarded as
having departed with the vanished years.

[Illustration]

Beyond the stock recreation afforded by the militarily-apparelled
Town Band of five, whose _repertoire_ appears to be confined to a
sad and serious opening march, a rather lugubrious galop, and a
couple of valses and a quick-step Polka, which evidently owe their
origin to the gen