158 THE OPEN AIR. 



provincial was used to the jogger system and heeded 

 it not. My own jogger was coming. Three to four 

 hundred country-folk had gone by gently and in a 

 gentlemanly way. Then came an English gentleman, 

 middle-aged, florid, not much tinctured with art or 

 letters, but garnished with huge gold watchchain and 

 with wealth as it were bulging out of his waistcoat 

 pocket. This gentleman positively walked into me, 

 pushed me — literally pushed me aside and took my 

 place, a place valuable to me at that moment for 

 one special aspect, and having shoved me aside, 

 gazed about him through his eyeglass, I suppose to 

 discover what it was interested me. He was a 

 genuine, thoroughbred jogger. The vast galleries of 

 the Louvre had not room enough for him. He was 

 one of the most successful joggers in the world, I feel 

 sure; any family might be proud of him. While 

 I am thus digressing, the bathers have gone over 

 thrice. 



The individual who had sat himself down by me 

 produced a little box and offered me a lozenge. I 

 did not accept it ; he took one himself in token that 

 they were harmless. Then he took a second, and 

 a third, and began to tell me of their virtues ; they 

 cured this and they alleviated that, they were the 

 greatest discovery of the age ; this universal lozenge 

 was health in the waistcoat pocket, a medicine-chest 

 between finger and thumb; the secret had been 

 extracted at last, and nature had given up the ghost 

 as it were of her hidden physic. His eloquence 

 conjured up in my mind a vision of the rocks beside 

 the Hudson river papered over with acres of adver- 



