the prompt side there was a screen, and on the
O. P. sat a hump-backed man with a flageolet
and a kettle-drum, the which he thumped and
blew alternately.

But he tootled on this pipe, and whanged the
parchment so long, that the audience grew
impatient. It was surely more than time for the
show to begin. Murmurs of "La femme
sauvage! La femme sauvage!" began to be heard.
"Eh marchez donc: faites voir vos trucs," was
the next expression of the popular wish. The
orator in full armour pushed his way through
the auditory, climbed on to the stage, and
disappeared behind the screen. Voices were now
heard in angry contention; but still the Wild
Woman failed to make her appearance.

There was the voice of a man, seemingly
endeavouring to pacify an infuriated woman. The
man's voice Lily recognised at once as that of
the orator in chivalric panoply whom she had
heard haranguing outside. The voice of the
woman:—Merciful Heavens! where had she
heard those angry tones before? and why did
they sound like a death-knell on her ear, and
send a cold shiver through her heart?

At this conjuncture a gentleman in a blouse,
affected perchance by the heat of the weather,
or by inordinate libations of cocoa, and stung to
desperation by the prolonged absence of the
Wild Woman and the monotonous iteration of
the flageolet and kettle-drum, cried out, "Attrape,
Mayeux!" and flung a roasted apple at the
orchestrant. Hit by the soddened pulp
precisely on the nose, the hunchback uttered an
unearthly yell, and rushed from the stage,
shrieking, "A la garde! à la garde!"

The sound of something breaking—glass
seemingly—was next heard, and a black bottle
became visible, and rolled to the footlights. The
gentleman who had flung the pomme cuite, and
who occupied a front row, picked the bottle off
the stage, smelt it, and exclaimed:

"Cognac. The Wild Woman must be en
ribotte."

But the words had scarcely left his lips before
the screen was violently dashed down, and a
woman, thinly clad in a tawdry and absurd
costume, made her appearance in the enforced
company of the orator in armour. I say enforced;
for, by one hand she held him by the hair of the
head, while with the other she brandished aloft
a three-legged stool, with which she was minded,
apparently, to brain him.

The audience taking this to be a part of the
performance, and, in fact, the prearranged
entrée en scène of the Wild Woman, began to
applaud vehemently; but the dolorous
expostulations of the armour-clad orator soon
undeceived them.

"Help, help!" he cried, in piteous accents;
"ladies and gentlemen, I shall be murdered!
This woman has taken too much cognac. She
is mad. She will kill me!"

Suddenly the Wild Woman relaxed her grasp,
flung the showman disdainfully on one side, and
stood planted in the middle of the stage, her
hands on her sides. Lily looked at her. She
was a powerful woman, lithe and shapely, but
of what age it was impossible to discover,
through the paint and the sham tattoo-marks
with which her face and arms were ruddled.
For all apparel she wore a suit of fleshings, a
blue gauze scarf, sandals, a spangled skirt which
failed to reach to her knees, and a preposterous
head-dress of Dutch metal and feathers.

But anon Lily became conscious that the
Wild Woman was looking at her with a fierce,
fixed, hungry gaze. There was something in
her eyes that struck infinite horror and terror
into her. And just as the Wild Woman made
a step in advance, as though towards her, Lily
started from her seat in affright, and rushed
from the booth.

A TOUCH OF THE GOUT.

When Sydenham, our father of medicine,
discoursed of gout, and felt it in his own toe as
he wrote, he found one poor comfort in the fact
"that gout, unlike any other disease, kills more
rich men than poor, more wise than simple.
Great kings, emperors, generals, admirals, and
philosophers, have all died of gout. Hereby
Nature shows her impartiality, since those whom
she favours in one way she afflicts in another."
It is always the rich uncle or father in the farce,
or the king in the burlesque, or the leading
statesman in parliament, who limps with a gouty
leg; and, until of late years when gout has
become rather common among the poor, there has
been a sense that gout was, at any rate, a
respectable disease to have. Savages never have
it. There can be no doubt that it is one of the
fruits of civilisation, and a very early fruit.
Gout troubled the old gentlemen who sat in the
Areopagus, and they had it in all forms. Their
physicians called it a foot seizure (podagra)
when it seized the foot, a hand seizure
(chiragra) when it took its victim by the hand, or
gonagra if it pinched the knee, or arthritis if it
inflamed several joints. It was first called gout
at the end of the thirteenth century, from the
Latin for a drop, because it was supposed to be
caused by a humour distilled drop by drop into
the joints. Seneca counted it among the signs
of Roman degeneration in luxury that even
the women got their equal share of gout;
gout being a disease rare in women, and, when
it does occur, occurring in them usually when
they are advanced in life. The disease, said a
doctor of Galen's time, is one that " none but
the gods can truly understand " its coming and
going; and that doctor told the case of a gouty
man, who, in an interval of his disorder, won a
foot-race at the Olympic games. In much later
time the appearance of the chalk-stones formed
in gouty joints, combined with knowledge of
one cause of gout to suggest the theory, that
they were deposits of the tartar of wine. It
was crusty port venting its crustiness upon its
friends.

Suppose that a man who considers himself
quite healthy is to have his first attack of gout.