Life with the Lid Off.

What is life? Some say that life is how you take it, others that it is all stings to all men, and that to be is to be stung. But life is merely more or less, according to the lights of the liver. To some it means the sun and the rain, to others the sum and the gain. Some back the bank, the swank and the rank, others find riches in poverty, and beauty in the face of Nature rather than in the raddled “restorations” begot of the beauty boosters. One man's moiety is another's misery, one's rapture is another's rupture, one's solace is another's solecism. Some like life in the raw, others like it served with tasty trimmings and condimented accoutrements on platinum plate. But the discerning diner demands the appetite to appreciate the “appetizer,” whether it be tripe or snipe, pullet or pheasant. An appetite finds flavour in divers dishes, and the wish is father to the dish. Life leads the liver who looks for life, and the dishes of destiny await the diner with an appetite accentuated by a sense of smell. Some who think they live should be arrested for false pretences. There was once a man who thought he had lived and discovered, seventy minutes before he died, that he had been dead for seventy years. Life is yearning rather than years, seeing rather than seething, desiring rather than acquiring. Life is real, not realty; life is full not fulsome; propitious for the unambitious, and “the goods” when the goods are not dry-goods.