"You don't know Carlsbad, or you wouldn't ask. The place is squirming
with spies and humbugs. If I had broken the rules one of the prize
humbugs laid down for me I should have been spotted in a tick by a spy,
and bowled out myself for a spy and a humbug rolled into one. Oh, Bunny,
if old man Dante were alive to-day I should commend him to that sink of
salubrity for the redraw material of another and a worse Inferno!"

The steaks had arrived, smoking hot, with a kidney apiece and lashings of
fried potatoes. And for a divine interval (as it must have been to him)
Raffles's only words were to the waiter, and referred to successive
tankards of bitter, with the superfluous rider that the man who said we
couldn't drink beer was a liar. But indeed I never could myself, and only
achieved the impossible in this case out of sheer sympathy with Raffles.
And eventually I had my reward, in such a recital of malignant privation
as I cannot trust myself to set down in any words but his.

"No, Bunny, you couldn't have borne it for half a week; you'd have looked
like that all the time!" quoth Raffles. I suppose my face had fallen (as
it does too easily) at his aspersion on my endurance. "Cheer up, my man;
that's better," he went on, as I did my best. "But it was no smiling
matter out there. No one does smile after the first week; your sense of
humour is the first thing the cure eradicates. There was a hunting man at
my hotel, getting his weight down to ride a special thoroughbred, and no
doubt a cheery dog at home; but, poor devil, he hadn't much chance of
good cheer there! Miles and miles on his poor feet before breakfast;
mud-poultices all the morning; and not the semblance of a drink all day,
except some aerated muck called Gieshuebler. He was allowed to lap that up
an hour after meals, when his tongue would be hanging out of his mouth.
We went to the same weighing machine at cock-crow, and though he looked