do with seven fatal ailments. Then to hear him tell about it, after he
has recovered, is to imagine that he is Lazarus over again, and that
the day of miracles has returned, that he ever lived to tell the tale.
All this refers to an acute attack. But when his trouble is chronic,
and it has to do, like dyspepsia, with a man's eating!--you cannot
escape. He _will_ tell you all about it.

In the first place, dyspepsia is such a refined and lady-like trouble.
It has no disgusting details. You can refer to it at all times without
fear of nauseating your hearers. In the second place, you can count on
nearly half of your hearers having it too, as dyspepsia is almost as
catching as Christian Science.

Carlyle was the most famous of dyspeptics. But magnificent as he was
in his growling, I fancy it is more bearable to read about it than it
was for that adorable wife of his to hear him talk about it. How well
we can imagine her feelings when she wrote, "The amount of bile that
he brings home is awfully grand."

But one forgives much of his dyspeptic talk, and even allows the
mantle of one's Christian charity to cover the sins of lesser
bile-cursed men to hear how he sums up the subject:

"With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much. But what, in
these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the
diseases of the liver? Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build
our stronghold. There, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us
offer sweet incense to the devil and live at ease on the fat things he
has provided for his elect."

I really do feel sorry for dyspeptics when I read a thing like that. I
am not heartless. It must be a sad thing not to be able to eat lobster
and ice-cream together, and to have to say "No" to broiled mushrooms,
and not to dare to eat Welsh-rarebits after the theatre, and to have
to lock up your chafing-dish. But I do say this: unless a man can talk
of his trouble as cleverly as Carlyle--and some of the choice
dyspeptics I know can almost do that--I want them not to talk at all.
If they suffer, let them do it in silence. If they die, let them die
entertainingly, or else, I say, don't die in public.

I never see a dyspeptic with his little pair of silver scales on the
table, weighing out two ounces of meat, or one ounce of bread, and
looking like a death's-head at a feast, and talking like a
grave-digger with Yorick's skull for a theme, that I do not think of
this:

"