consulting-room; and then, when I had seated her in the patient's chair
and myself at the writing-table, she continued: "It's my inside, you
know, Doctor."

The statement lacked anatomical precision and merely excluded the domain
of the skin specialist. I accordingly waited for enlightenment and
speculated on the watercress-beds, while Mrs. Jablett regarded me
expectantly with a dim and watery eye.

"Ah!" I said, at length; "it's your--your inside, is it, Mrs. Jablett?"

"Yus. _And_ my 'ead," she added, with a voluminous sigh that filled the
apartment with odorous reminiscences of "unsweetened."

"Your head aches, does it?"

"Somethink chronic!" said Mrs. Jablett. "Feels as if it was a-opening
and a-shutting, a-opening and a-shutting, and when I sit down I feel as
if I should _bust_."

This picturesque description of her sensations--not wholly inconsistent
with her figure--gave the clue to Mrs. Jablett's sufferings. Resisting a
frivolous impulse to reassure her as to the elasticity of the human
integument, I considered her case in exhaustive detail, coasting
delicately round the subject of "unsweetened," and finally sent her
away, revived in spirits and grasping a bottle of Mist. Sodae cum
Bismutho from Barnard's big stock-jar. Then I went back to investigate
the Horrible Discovery; but before I could open the paper, another
patient arrived (_Impetigo contagiosa_, this time, affecting the "wide
and archèd-front sublime" of a juvenile Fetter Laner), and then yet