_Shares._--_Always_ go shares." R.F. * * * * * HEART OF MINE. (_Being a rather hysterical contribution from our Analytical Novelist._) _Friday._--I suppose one never realises till one is actually dead how nearly dead one can be without actually being it. You see what I mean? No. Well, how blithely, how recklessly one rollicks through life, fondly believing that one is in the best of health, in the prime of condition, and all the time one is the unconscious victim of some fatal infirmity or disease. I mean, take my own case. I went to see my doctor in order to be cured of hay fever. He examined my heart. He made me take off my shirt. He hammered my chest; he rapped my ribs with his knuckles to see if they sounded hollow. I don't know why he did this, but I think he was at one time attached to a detective and has got into the habit of looking for secret passages and false panels and so on. Anyhow, he suspected my chest, and he listened at it for so long that any miscreant who had been concealed in it would have had to give himself away by coughing or blowing his nose. After a long time he said, "Your heart's dilated. You want a complete rest. Don't work. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Don't eat. Don't do anything. Take plenty of exercise. Sit perfectly still. Don't mope. Don't rush about. Take this before and after every meal. Only don't have any meals." I laughed at him. I knew my heart was perfectly sound, much sounder than most men's. I went home. I didn't even have the prescription made up. _Saturday._--Now comes the tragic thing. _That very night I realised that he was right._ There _is_ something wrong with my heart. It is too long. It is too wide. It is too thick. It is out of place. It would be difficult to say _exactly_ where the measurements are wrong, but one has a sort of _sense_ ... you know?... One can feel that it is too large.... A swollen feeling.... Somehow I never felt this before; I never even felt that it was there ... but now I always know that it is there--trying to get out.... I put my hand on it and can feel it definitely expanding--like a football bladder. Sometimes I think it wants to get out at my collar-bone; sometimes I think it will blow out under my bottom rib; sometimes some other way. It is terrible.... I have had the prescription made up.