"What!" [exclaims the writer] "shall a man be invited to a feast? shall he don his white tie with care and take his way through the inclement weather to his friend's home, determined, though weary and jaded with his daily toil, to shine at his best, and repay with the blithest company his friend's entertainment? and shall he be offered lemonade to drink? It is enough to curdle the milk of human kindness in his breast forever. Or iced water? Why, it would throw a chill upon the warmest good will, and freeze the speech even upon the lips of a lover. The man is neither a wine-bibber nor a sot. But he is accustomed to drink his glass of wine, even as he is accustomed to eat his dinner, and one is as necessary to him as the other. Well, we do not imagine that he dines with him twice." The Sunday two- or three-o'clock dinner is a barbarism which calls loudly for suppression--a custom that has no justifiable motive, inasmuch as the only pretence for its existence is of questionable benefit to the servants, who are obliged to share equally the penalty visited upon every one by whom it is tolerated. As well establish a weekly custom of a Saturday banquet at midnight in order to allow the cook a full afternoon for visiting. For what are the inevitable results? Accustomed to the dinner in the evening and the luncheon at noon, for which the machinery of digestion is set in perfect accord, the stomach is called upon to fast on the day devoted to rest until long after the period for the performance of its regular offices--to be surfeited with excessive ingestion at a time when appetite is ravenous and the secretory organs are unable to perform their customary functions. Gluttony and subsequent lethargy are a necessary consequent, followed by a disturbed state of the digestion perhaps for days afterwards. The pathological deduction of irregular eating is a simple one. The stomach, having supplied its secretions at the accustomed time, waits but a brief period before it allows such secretions to be absorbed when deprived of the aliments that aid in the production of fresh supplies. After a few such experiences the secretions diminish in amount and in activity, even when food is introduced in the digestive tract, and stomachic disturbance is an inevitable sequence. It will thus be manifest that the Sunday-afternoon dinner and late Sunday supper become the greatest of all invitations to gastric disorders, and that the master and mistress of the well-regulated household should firmly resent this almost universal imposition. No one knows better than the physician the serious ailments caused by Sunday engorgement and irregular eating. And yet no one in this respect remains more passive to his own welfare or that of his patients.