quite sure a meal composed to any extent of nuts would _kill_ her, for
if she took even one walnut after dinner it gave her such pain. That rather
reminds one of the story of a half-witted fellow who used to go about the
country doing odd jobs, and asking in return a meal and a shake-down of
straw or hay.

He always expressed astonishment at folks being able to sleep on feather
beds, his aversion being founded on the fact that he had one night lain down
on the hard ground with a single feather under him. "An' if I had sic a
sarkfu' o' sair banes wi _ae_ feather," he argued, "what like maun it
be wi' a hale bed?"

Well, I can assure readers that whatever may be the troubles of a solitary
nut in an oasis of good things, it is very different when nuts are taken
alone or in a suitable and simple combination. Most of our digestive
troubles are due to an excess of proteid matter, which clogs up the system,
and either lodges in the body in the shape of some morbid secretion, or
tries to force its way out in an abnormal way, as by the skin. Now, nuts
are very rich in proteid, or flesh-forming matter, and it stands to reason,
that if we superimpose them on an already full, or overfull, meal, the
result is surfeit, and however wholesome or digestible this excess matter
may be in itself, it may, and usually does, work harm in more or less
obvious ways.

But curiously enough, this does not always work out with mathematical
directness. Most things in the physical, as in the metaphysical, world work
out as Ruskin says "not mathematically, but chemically." Though this may
seem a far-fetched simile in connection with our dinner, it is a true one.
To get back to our nuts. If after a meal of several courses, rich in
quality and variety, highly-spiced and flavoured, and perhaps interspersed