quite good-natured once when I caught him asleep in his chair, I have
known him tear up his weight ticket when he had gained an ounce or two
instead of losing one or two pounds. We began by taking our walks
together, but his conversation used to get so physically introspective
that one couldn't get in a word about one's own works edgeways."

"But there was nothing wrong with your works," I reminded Raffles; he
shook his head as one who was not so sure.

"Perhaps not at first, but the cure soon sees to that! I closed in like a
concertina, Bunny, and I only hope I shall be able to pull out like one.
You see, it's the custom of the accursed place for one to telephone for
a doctor the moment one arrives. I consulted the hunting man, who of
course recommended his own in order to make sure of a companion on the
rack. The old arch-humbug was down upon me in ten minutes, examining me
from crown to heel, and made the most unblushing report upon my general
condition. He said I had a liver! I'll swear I hadn't before I went to
Carlsbad, but I shouldn't be a bit surprised if I'd brought one back."

And he tipped his tankard with a solemn face, before falling to work upon
the Welsh rarebit which had just arrived.

"It looks like gold, and it's golden eating," said poor old Raffles. "I
only wish that sly dog of a doctor could see me at it! He had the nerve
to make me write out my own health-warrant, and it was so like my friend
the hunting man's that it dispelled his settled gloom for the whole of
that evening. We used to begin our drinking day at the same well of
German damnably defiled, and we paced the same colonnade to the blare of
the same well-fed band. That wasn't a joke, Bunny; it's not a thing to
joke about; mud-poultices and dry meals, with teetotal poisons in