to a healthy appetite for dinner, it has much the same effect as does kerosene oil when administered to an able-bodied mosquito. The insidiously appealing draught itself, the seemingly innocuous slices of buttered toast and little cakes which are wont to accompany it, homoeopathic as are their proportions, undermine and corrode a system accustomed to soups and rare beef as infallibly as the imported luxuries of Greece sapped the stamina of the Roman Empire. What is more, the whole manner of conducting this function is invested with a factitious suggestion of coziness highly inimical to the equipoise of a bachelor’s philosophy. He will be seen to prosper amazingly in his solitude at all hours save this of the transitory tryst of day and darkness; but there is something malignantly hypnotic about the tinkle of little spoons on porcelain saucers, the contented purr of a brass kettle, and the subdued hum of conversation, all of which are to the tea-table what the somnolent
