suppresses any tendency to facetiousness, or what respectable English
people call _double entendre_, and brings you _en rapport_ with the
serious people who read these publications. So soon as you begin to feel
wakeful and restless discontinue writing. For what is vulgarly known as
the _fin-de-siècle_ type of publication, on the other hand, one should
limit oneself to an aërated bread shop for a week or so, with the
exception of an occasional tea in a literary household. All people fed
mainly on scones become clever. And this regimen, with an occasional
debauch upon macaroons, chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily
walks from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the
Green Park, to Westminster and back, should result in an animated
society satire.

It is not known what Mr. Kipling takes to make him so peculiar. Many of
us would like to know. Possibly it is something he picked up in the
jungle--berries or something. A friend who made a few tentative
experiments to this end turned out nothing beyond a will, and that he
dictated and left incomplete. (It was scarcely on the lines of an
ordinary will, being blasphemous, and mentioning no property except his
inside.) For short stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and
hard biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science novel one
should take an abundance of boiled rice and toast and water.

However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion. Every writer in
the end, so soon as his digestion is destroyed, must ascertain for
himself the peculiar diet that suits him best--that is, which disagrees
with him the most. If everything else fails he might try some chemical
food. "Jabber's Food for Authors," by the bye, well advertised, and with
portraits of literary men, in their drawing-rooms, "Fed entirely on
Jabber's Food," with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and