176 OCCASIONAL HAPPY THOUGHTS. 



an irregular cough. The cough is horridly exasperating for 

 one minute — twists me about till I feel like a limp corkscrew 

 — not that this can convey any idea to anyone of my particu- 

 lar sensation, so I will say, as I do to Boodells, who happens 

 to look in (being in the neighbourhood), that I experience a 

 sensation like what I can imagine a chicken would feel whose 

 neck had been only half wrung, and who had been left on a 

 lawn to revive as best he could. 



Boodells is not much of a fellow to come and see you when 

 you're ill. It is not that he is exactly 2^;zsympathetic, but 

 he has always had everything you've got now, himself, a long 

 time ago, and pretends to make nothing of it. 



He is full of how he treats himself when he is taken just 

 m the same way. He says to me, " My dear fellow, you 

 give way so. Why, I have a cough for more than half the 

 year, twice as bad as what you've got now, and / never lay 

 up for it." 



Then I don't believe that his was ever half or a quarter as 

 bad as mine, or he wouldn't be here now to tell me of it. 

 Boodells would have been done for long ago. I tell him that 

 I suffer agonies at intervals. He won't believe it, because he 

 doesn't see me pale, emaciated, and writhing on a bed of 

 sickness. 



I am sitting before a fire in my armchair, and (I admit it 

 — I ckn't help admitting it, much as I regret it) looking un- 

 commonly well. That's the worst of me ; however ill I am, 

 I invariably look well, and always look better, and feel better, 

 too, when a Doctor comes, just at the very minute when I 

 really do want to give him a specimen of how bad I can be. 



