amusing to watch the crowds coming and going--earnest invalids and that
most numerous body of middle aged, middle class people who have no
particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is
getting even with their appetites. He could pick out every order at a
glance--he did not need to wait until he saw the tumblers at their lips.
Now and then a dashing girl came gliding in, and, though the draft was
noxious to her, drank the stuff off with a neutral look and well bred
indifference to the distress about her. Or in strode the private
secretary of some distinguished being in London, S.W. He invariably
carried his glass to the door, drank it off in languid sips as he leaned
indolently against the masonry, and capped the event by purchasing a rose
for his buttonhole, so making a ceremony which smacked of federating the
world at a common public drinking trough into a little fete. Or there were
the good priests from a turbulent larruping island, who with cheeks
blushing with health and plump waistcoats came ambling, smiling, to their
thirty ounces of noisome liquor. Then, there was Baron, the bronzed,
idling, comfortable trader from Zanzibar, who, after fifteen years of hide
and seek with fever and Arabs and sudden death--wherewith were all manner
of accident and sundry profane dealings not intended for The Times or
Exeter hall, comes back to sojourn in quiet "Christom" places, a lamb in
temper, a lion at heart, an honest soul who minds his own business, is
enemy to none but the malicious, and lives in daily wonder that the wine
he drank the night before gets into trouble with the waters drunk in the
morning. And the days, weeks and months go on, but Baron remains, having
seen population after population of water drinkers come and go. He was
there years ago. He is there still, coming every year, and he does not
know that George Hagar has hung him at Burlington House more than once,
and he remembers very well the pretty girl he did not marry, who also, on
one occasion, joined the aristocratic company "on the line."