Moans and Bones.

A doctor often retains some glimmering of respect for the weight-for-age entry, but the Napoleon of finance too prolific of bony parts is nought but a case of false pretences. The human frame-up, when divested of its sartorial hypocrisy, is at best at its worst, whichever way you look at it. It is either an unqualified apology or a bare-faced lie.

When the patient has unearthed the skeleton in his wardrobe the doctor focusses his stethoscopic sights and gets the range. Having got a bead on the quarry, his whole being seems to protest and cry out: “It can't be true; it is a hospital illusion, a shirtless chimera, a broken malady in A minus.” He touches it to see if it is real; it reels before the breath of suspicion. The doctor hides his head in a poultice and great sobs shake his confidence. Doctors are only flesh

“The boyish figure is no girlish dream.”

page 15 and bone-setters after all. Who can blame them if they stand aghast at the awfulness of Nature.

“What do you suggest?” whimpers Napoleon.

“You are beyond the power of suggestion or digestion,” says the doctor. “You are a human frailty, and should travel in an egg crate, packed in sawdust. You are really only a passing thought or a minus quantity; plus-fours might pull you together, otherwise I would suggest putting you in splints until you set. What you require is a complete change of body—mind the grating as you go out.”

The human hiatus reassembles himself and rattles off among the maddening throng like a second-hand body without tyres, length without breadth, geometry without symmetry, or a thin excuse simply because he neglected to practice the precept, “take heed of the sorrow.”

Sport is an essential credential to bounding health. It is not necessary to be a bounder before you can bound, any more than a flounder should flounder or a limpet limp, but constant impact with Mother Earth either fore or aft is conducive to long levity and muscu-hilarity.

Let us ferment:

The worm I fear is not a sport,
Such things as games it spurns,
It spends its days in chewing mud,
And turns.
The worm although a useful thing,
Or so the text-books say,
Is quite content to fill itself
With clay.
It never takes its family out
To see a football match,
Its life is boring and, methinks
No catch.
It simply worms its weary way
With neither hope nor thought,
And never turns its energies
To sport.
The worm spends all its time in toil
Beneath the soil it hides,
And no one knows just what it does
Besides.
And thus it goes from bad to worse,
From day to day interred,
And if it leaves its home it gets
The bird.

a big band on the railway