uninclusive terms, and joyously stretched their free limbs unswaddled by red-tape. Soon London became a forgotten nightmare.
They wrote to me irregularly, tantalising me unwittingly with glimpses of buoyant wave and sunny pasture. It fretted me to be immured in the stone-prison of the metropolis, and my friends' letters did but sprinkle sea-salt on my wounds; for I was working up a medical practice in the northern district, and my absence might prove fatal—not so much, perhaps, to my patients as to my prospects. I was beginning to be recognised as a specialist in throats and eyes, and I invariably sent my clients' ears to my old hospital chum, Robins, which increased the respect of the neighbourhood for my professional powers. Your general practitioner is a suspiciously omniscient person, and it is far sager to know less and to charge more.
"My dear Ted," wrote the Woolwich Infant (of course we could not escape calling Jack Woolwich thus), "I do wish we had you here. Such larks! We've got the most comical cuss of a waiter you ever saw. I feel sure he would appeal irresistibly to your sense of humour. He seems to boss the whole establishment. His name is Jones; and when you have known him a day you feel that he is the only Jones—the only Jones possible. He is a middle-aged man, with a slight stoop and a cat-like crawl. His face is large and flabby, ornamented with mutton-chop whiskers, streaked as with the silver of half a century of tips. He is always at your elbow—a mercenary Mephistopheles—suggesting drives or sails, and recommending certain yachts, boats, and carriages with insinuative irresistibleness. He has the tenacity of an army of able-bodied leeches, and if you do not take his advice he spoils your day. You may shake him off by fleeing into the interior of the Isle, or
