I have heard it said that certain orders of beings are able to improvise or to interchange organs, just as need calls. Thus a polyp, if hard put to it, may shift what little brain and stomach happen to be in his possession. You may say that he carries his heart in his hand. He can take his stomach, and dump it down in brain-case or thorax, just as he fancies,--can organize viscera and victory anywhere, at any moment; and all works merrily. The Fatless was similar, yet different. His stomach changed not its local habitation, was never victorious; yet, from cap to boot, it was ubiquitous and despotic. Brain and heel alike felt themselves to be mere squatters on another's soil, and had a vague idea that the rightful lord might some day come to oust them, and build up a new capital in these far-away districts. Sometimes they went so far as to style themselves his proconsuls and lieutenants, but they were never suffered to do more than simply to register the decrees of the central power. Duespeptos was king only in name,--_roi faineant_. Gaster was the power behind the throne,--the Mayor of the Palace,--the great Grand-Vizier. Nought went merrily, for he ruled with a rod of iron. Every day his strange freaks set the empire topsy-turvy. Every day there was growling and ill-feeling at his whimsical tyranny,--but nothing more. Secession was as impossible as in the day of Menenius Agrippa. Looking at it another way, Gaster might be called the object-glass through which Duespeptos looked out upon the world,--a glass always bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision, would have been the Chinese form of greeting: "How is your stomach? Have you eaten your rice?" or, perhaps, the Egyptian style: "How do you perspire?" With him, the peptic bond was the only real one; all others were shams. All sin was peptic in origin: Eve ate an apple which disagreed with her. The only satisfactory atonement, therefore, must be gastric. All reforms hitherto had profited nothing, because they had been either cerebral or cardiac. None had started squarely from Gaster, the true centre. Moral reform was better than intellectual, since the heart lay nearer than the head to the stomach. Phalansteries, Pantisocracies, Unitary Homes, Asylums, Houses of Refuge,--these were all mere makeshifts. The hope of the world lay in Hygeian Institutes. Heroes of heart and brain must bow before the hero of the stomach. Judged by any right test of greatness, Graham was more a man than was Napoleon or John Howard. He that ruled his stomach was greater than he who took a city. Beranger's Roi d'Yvetot, who ate four meals a day,--the Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and tallow-candles,--the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee,--the