RUD. Oh, now for my detective's report. (Opens letter.) What's this! Another conspiracy! A conspiracy to depose me! And my private detective was so convulsed with laughter at the notion of a conspirator selecting him for a confidant that he was physically unable to arrest the malefactor! Why, it'll come off! This comes of engaging a detective with a keen sense of the ridiculous! For the future I'll employ none but Scotchmen. And the plot is to explode to-morrow! My wedding day! Oh, Caroline, Caroline! (Weeps.) This is perfectly frightful! What's to be done? I don't know! I ought to keep cool and think, but you can't think when your veins are full of hot soda-water, and your brain's fizzing like a firework, and all your faculties are jumbled in a perfect whirlpool of tumblication! And I'm going to be ill! I know I am! I've been living too low, and I'm going to be very ill indeed! SONG—RUDOLPH. When you find you're a broken-down critter, Who is all of a trimmle and twitter, With your palate unpleasantly bitter, As if you'd just eaten a pill— When your legs are as thin as dividers, And you're plagued with unruly insiders, And your spine is all creepy with spiders, And you're highly gamboge in the gill— When you've got a beehive in your head, And a sewing machine in each ear, And you feel that you've eaten your bed, And you've got a bad headache down here— When such facts are about, And these symptoms you find In your body or crown— Well, you'd better look out, You may make up your mind You had better lie down! When your lips are all smeary—like tallow, And your tongue is decidedly yallow, With a pint of warm oil in your swallow, And a pound of tin-tacks in your chest— When you're down in the mouth with the vapours, And all over your Morris wall-papers Black-beetles are cutting their capers, And crawly things never at rest— When you doubt if your head is your own, And you jump when an open door slams— Then you've got to a state which is known To the medical world as "jim-jams" If such symptoms you find In your body or head, They're not easy to quell— You may make up your mind You are better in bed, For you're not at all well! (Sinks exhausted and weeping at foot of well.) Enter LUDWIG.