Mr. Quinine was an eminent painter of “still-life;” and though his braces of partridges on canvas, and his dead hares, and his grapes and pine-apples “in oil” were highly admired, and fetched large sums, it was nevertheless as much as he could do to pay the physician’s fees by his game and fruit pieces. While his wife was breakfasting or supping off her dainties in bed, or “doing” the elegant and interesting invalid in white cambric on the sofa in the front room, or riding out in the Park, he, (poor man!) was painting away for dear life in his studio at the back of the house. This the clever little artist (for he stood but five foot five in his high-heeled Wellingtons) did without a murmur; for, truth to say, he doated on his dear Blanche, and strove, by making “studies” of the “birds” prescribed by Doctor Twaddles before they were cooked for his wife’s dinner, somehow or other to lessen the expenses of “the housekeeping;” for not one of the Doctor’s delectable dietetic prescriptions was ever sent to Covent Garden or Leadenhall Market to be “dispensed,” but the economic Quinine was sure to use it as a model before administering it to the patient. But even if the little man had felt inclined to raise his voice against the course pursued, he would immediately have had the united battery of Twaddles and Blanche opened against him; and while the lady overpowered him with tears, the Doctor would have impressed upon him, in the most solemn manner, that unless Mrs. Quinine could be allowed to enjoy the greatest tranquillity of both mind and body, and be assured the gratification of her slightest wish, it was beyond the highest talent in the kingdom to undertake to say what distressing event might happen. * * * * * The opening of the Great Exhibition had operated almost as magically upon the nerves of the susceptible Mrs. Quinine, as an invitation to a _Thé Dansante_. Her bronchitis, and the “short hacking cough” which accompanied it, had almost disappeared under the influence of the delicious _pâte de Guimauve_, prescribed by Doctor Twaddles; the lady’s neuralgia had been dissipated by her steel medicine (and she had swallowed enough of that metal in her time to have admitted of being cut up into “magnum bonum” pens for the million); the “weak state of her nerves” no longer required the carriage-way in front of her house to be strewn with straw, nor the iron-hand of the street-door knocker to be embellished with a white kid glove; for the lady had grown suddenly “so much better,” that on requesting permission of Doctor Twaddles to visit the Exhibition, she declared that she felt herself quite equal to the task of exploring even its “five miles of galleries.”