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