The Doctor invariably acted upon the apparently disinterested plan of objecting to the use of physic—excepting of course in the most urgent cases. Formerly, according to the old fable, curriers were prone to insist there was nothing like leather, but of late the contrary, and far more lucrative, practice has sprung up among us; and now-a-days lawyers counsel their clients on no account to “go to law,”—with the greatest possible success; and physicians rail at the exhibition of physic—to equal advantage. With Doctor Twaddles, “diet was everything”—all maladies proceeding, according to his popular pathology, from the stomach; for patients, he had long ago discovered, never objected to being fed into good health, however strong an aversion they might have to being dosed into convalescence. Another mode of insinuation that the Doctor adopted was to explain to the invalids, in language that they could not possibly understand, the cause of the malady for which he was prescribing, and the reason for the remedies be adopted: this he did in short family physiological lectures, which he loved to illustrate by the most ordinary objects. He would tell the astonished and half-affrighted patients how the greater part of the food taken into the system acted simply as coals to the vital fire,—how the lungs were, if he might be allowed the expression, nothing more than the grate in which the alimentary fuel was being consumed, and keeping up a continued supply of caloric for the human frame, for, that the selfsame operation was going on in the human chest as in the stove beside him. As he said this, the bald-headed Doctor would lean back with evident self-satisfaction in the easy chair, and swing his watch-seals round and round like a watchman’s rattle. Then he usually proceeded to explain how every human creature was burning away, in the process of respiration, at the least one pound of charcoal per diem; that every meal was, when viewed with the philosophic eye, nothing more than throwing another shovelful or two of coals on to the ever-consuming fire; and that for himself, he did not care in what form the charcoal was introduced into the system, but one pound of it he must really insist upon being swallowed daily. Mrs. Quinine—who, by-the-bye, never lost an opportunity of impressing upon strangers that her name was pronounced Keneen, even as the Beauvoirs, the Cholmondeleys, the Majoribanks, and the Cockburns, insist upon being called Beavers, Chumleys, Marchbanks, and Coburns—Mrs. Quinine, we repeat, agreed with the rest of the female world in her estimation of the dear old Doctor Twaddles. Nor was it to be wondered at, for the Doctor certainly did his best to make the lady’s indisposition as pleasant and profitable as possible to her.