OF all subjects under or over the sun, there is none perhaps, even including bimetallism, or the lengthy¹ description of golf-links which one has never seen, so utterly² below possible zones of interest as that of health. Health, of course, matters quite enormously to the individual, but nobody with good health ever gives two thoughts (far less one word) to the subject. Nobody, in fact, begins to think about health until his own begins to be inferior. But, then, as if that was not bad enough, he at once clubs and belabours his unhappy friends with its inferiority. It becomes to him the one affair of absorbing importance. Emperors may be assassinated⁴, Governments may crumble,{10} it may even be 92 degrees in the shade, but he recks nothing of those colossal⁵ things. He ate strawberries yesterday, and has had a bilious⁶ headache almost ever since. And the world ceases to revolve⁷ round the sun, and the moon is turned to blood, or ashes—I forget which.

But the real invalid⁸, just like the man who enjoys real health, never talks about such matters. It is only to the amateur in disease that they are of the smallest interest. The man who is well never thinks about his health, and certainly never mentions it; to the man who is really ill some divine sense of irresponsibility is given. He brushes it aside, just as one brushes aside any innate⁹ inability; with common courage—how lavishly¹⁰ is beautiful gift given to whomever really needs it—he makes the best of other things.

These poignant¹¹ though obvious reflections are the outcome of what occurred this evening. I sat between two friends at dinner, both of them people in whom one’s heart rejoices. But one of them is

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