I grieve to say neither strove to benefit his kind. His lordship went on the music-hall stage, made up as a costermonger, and devoted his wonderful voice and his musical genius to singing a cockney ballad with a chorus consisting merely of the words "Ba, ba, ba, boodle-dee" repeated sixteen times. It caught on like a first-class epidemic. "Ba, ba, ba, boodle-dee" microbes floated in every breeze. The cholera-chorus raged from Piccadilly to Land's End, from Kensington to John o'Groats. The swarthy miners hewed the coal to it. It dropped from passing balloons, the sailors manned the capstan to it, and the sound of it superseded fog-horns. Duchesses danced to it, and squalid infants cried for it. Divines with difficulty kept it out of their sermons, philosophers drew weighty lessons from it, critics traced its history, and as it didn't mean anything the greatest Puritans hummed it inaccurately. "Ba, ba, ba, boodle-dee," sang Lord Arthur nightly at six halls and three theatres, incidentally clearing off all the debts on the family estates, and, like a flock of sheep, the great British public took up the bleat, and in every hall and drawing-room blossomed the big pearl buttons of the cockney costermonger. But Captain Athelstan came to the front far more easily, if less profitably. He sent a testimonial to the Perfect Cure Elixir. The Elixir was accustomed to testimonials from the suffering millions. The spelling generally had to be corrected before they were fit for publication. It also received testimonials which were useless, such as: "I took only one bottle of your Elixir and I got fourteen days." But a testimonial from a Captain of the Guards was a gold-mine. The Captain's was the best name the Elixir had ever had, and he had enjoyed more diseases than it had hitherto professed to cure. Astonished by its own success the Elixir resolved to make a big spurt and kill off all its rivals. For the next few months Captain Athelstan was rammed down the throats of all England. He came with the morning milk in all the daily papers, he arrived by the first post in a circular, he stared at people from every dead wall when they went out to business, he was with them at lunch, in little plaques and placards in every restaurant, he nodded at them in every bar, rode with them in every train and tram-car, either on the wall or on the back of the ticket, joined them at dinner in the evening papers and supplied the pipe lights after the meal. You took up a magazine and found he had slipped between the sheets, you went to bed and his diseased figure haunted your dreams. Life lost its sweetness, literature its charm. The loathsome phantasm of the complexly-afflicted Captain got between you and the sunshine. Stiff examination papers (compiled from the Captain) were set at every breakfast-table, and you were sternly interrogated as to whether you felt an all-gone sensation at the tip of your nose, and you were earnestly adjured to look at your old diseases.