I am never irritable myself; I am sometimes justifiably annoyed by the unreasonable conduct of a friend. But I have often noticed the most melancholy irritability in others, and have wondered why they gave way to it, and what it portended. Now I know. I have been reading the _Medical Press and Courier_, and I learn from it that "this hyperæsthesia of the temper is the direct outcome of overwork and want of sleep; in fact, it is a morbid sensitiveness of the cells of the cerebral cortex due to exhaustion or under-nutrition. Irritability is, therefore a clinical sign of some importance, the more so because it is often the premonitory indication of impending breakdown. Under these circumstances, the condition is usually most marked during the forenoon, and is associated with a distaste for food at breakfast time. Later on, even the humanising effect of a good lunch fails to raise circulatory activity to the standard required for adequate cerebral nutrition, and the irritability becomes chronic, yielding only to the influence of repeated doses of a diffusible stimulant, such as brandy and soda. The remedy naturally only aggravates the symptom, which is sooner or later followed by other manifestations of cerebral exhaustion." * * * * * When you're lost in the whirl of a medical vortex, You gasp and you grasp, and you'll struggle in vain; For it seems you have cells in your cerebral cortex, Which is somehow connected, I fancy, with brain. Exhausted and panting with under-nutrition, You dare not presume to declare yourself well, And you rapidly tend to complete inanition, Produced by a morbidly sensitive cell. The result is a wound to the temper, a something Not as deep as a well, but, no matter, it serves, Perplexing your friends, who pronounce it a rum thing That DICK--that's yourself--should have gone in the nerves. You toy with your breakfast; the kidney, the kipper, The egg that is buttered, the egg that is fried, The tea that once found you a regular sipper, Unsipped and untasted you push them aside. Your lunch of cold beef with the gaff and the shandy, You simply can't face it, your head is one ache: A "diffusible stimulant" (alias brandy) Is all that you wish for and all that you take. A day or two back all your manners were courtly, Alas, what a change is apparent to-day, For you jump on your friends, and you take them up shortly, With a quarrel a minute whatever they say. Then, in spite of the canon that's set 'gainst self-slaughter (In the language of verdicts it's _felo de se_,) Some day you'll be found with your head in the water, Six inches will do, or attached to a tree. * * * * *