You began to read an eloquent description of the Alps, and lo! there was the Captain perched on top. You started a thrilling story of the sea, and the Captain bobbed up from the bottom; you began a poetical allegory concerning the Valley of the Shadow, and you found the Captain had been living there all his life--till he came upon the Elixir. A little innocent child remarked, "Pater, it is almost bath-time," and you felt for your handkerchief in view of a touching domestic idyl, but the Captain froze your tears. "Why have sunstroke in India?" you were asked, and the Captain supplied the answer. Something came like a thief in the night. It was the Captain. You were startled to see that there was "A Blight Over All Creation," but it turned out to be only the Captain. Everything abutted on the Captain--Shakespeare and the musical glasses, the Venus of Milo and the Mikado, Day and Night and all the seasons, the potato harvest and the Durham Coal Strike, the advantages of early rising, and the American Copyright Act. He was at the bottom of every passage, he lurked in every avenue, he was at the end of every perspective. The whole world was familiar with his physical symptoms, and his sad history. The exploits of Julius Cæsar were but a blur in the common mind, but everybody knew that the Captain's skin grew Gobelin blue, that the whites of his eyes turned green, and his tongue stuck in his cheek, and that the rest of his organism behaved with corresponding gruesomeness. Everybody knew how they dropped off, "petrified by my breath," and how his sympathetic friends told him in large capitals "YOU WILL NEVER GET BETTER, CAPTAIN," and how his weeping mother, anxious to soothe his last hours, remarked in reply to a request for another box of somebody else's pills, "THE ONLY BOX YOU'LL EVER WANT WILL BE A COFFIN," and how "HE THOUGHT IT WAS ONLY CHOLERA," but how one dose of the Elixir (which new-born babies clamored for in preference to their mother's milk) had baffled all their prognostications and made him a celebrity for life. In private the Captain said that he really had these ailments, though he only discovered the fact when he read the advertisements of the Elixir. But the Mess had an inkling that it was all done for a wager, and christened him "The Perfect Cure." To me he justified himself on the ground that he had scrupulously described himself as having his tongue in his cheek, and that he really suffered from love-sickness, which was worse than all the ills the Elixir cured.