THE INTERESTING INVALID.
An Alice-in-Wonderlandish Sea-Dream.
["An inquiry into the circumstances under which the cultivation and storage of oysters and other shell-fish around our coast are carried out, which it is stated Mr. Bryce is about to institute, will serve a useful purpose, especially in the case of 'other shell-fish,'"—Daily Chronicle.]
'Twas the voice of the Lobster, I heard him declare,
"Doctors frighten our Dandos, and that isn't fair.
'Inquiry on Shell-fish'? Oh! blow Mr. Bryce!
You will soon be all right if you take my advice!"
"Well, I hope so, I'm sure," said the Walrus to the Carpenter.
"Or else what is to become of our pleasant little picnics on the sea-shore?" said the Carpenter to the Walrus.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were hovering round the bed;
They wept like anything to see
Each Oyster hang his head;
"If they go on like this," they cried,
"They'll very soon be dead!"
"Drat 'em!" grumbled Nurse Crab. "They've been taking a drain too much, I feel sewer."
"You're another, Mrs. Gamp," murmured a Native, lifting his head limply from his brown-sand bolster, and dropping it back again with a disconsolate dab.
"If you make bad puns to 'em in their present low state I won't answer for the consequences," said Dr. Lobster, pulling Nurse Crab's shelly apron in professional remonstrance.
Nurse Crab squared her claws like Amazonian elbows, and rolled her protuberant eyes scornfully.
"Feel their pulses," suggested the Carpenter.
"They haven't got any," snapped Dr. Lobster. "Besides my claws are not suited for pulse-feeling."
"Make 'em put their tongues out," hinted the Walrus.
"Tongues?" sneered Dr. Lobster, derisively. "Don't you know that, like Charles Reade's nigger, oysters are 'darned anomalies,'—
'Because they have beards without any chin,
And get out of bed to be tucked in.'"
"Old riddles are more painful than bad puns," protested the bed-ridden bivalve. "Tucked in, indeed. Well, I shall never get out of bed again, that's one thing," he continued, with a spitefully triumphant look at the Walrus and the Carpenter.
"Oh, don't say that!" said the Carpenter, tearfully.
The Artful Oyster looked at him,
But no word more he said;
The Artful Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his fevered head;
As who should say "'Tis not for you,
I'll leave the oyster-bed."
"Silence in the sick-room, or I'll turn you all out of it," snapped Dr. Lobster, making his claws click like infuriated castanets in the Walrus's ears.
As a duck in a thunderstorm, quite thunder-struck,
Each sixpenny bivalve looks "down on his luck."
Fancy six bob a dozen! You ought to be nice,
You dear little darlings, most dear—at the price!
What have you been doing to make yourself sick
Like a lot of slum-dwellers? Come, answer me quick!
"'Spect they're shamming," said Nurse Crab, crabbily.
"I'd like to poison the lot of you!" muttered the irascible invalid.
"Just what you've been trying to do, you murderous mossels!" retorted Nurse Crab.
"Mussels? No! Come now! we're not as bad as they are," protested the better-class bivalve, indignantly. "Mussels, indeed! Mussels are low things, cheap and nasty shams, sold by costers at a penny a plateful, and eaten by the ravenous rabble with black pepper and their fingers! Eugh!" The superior mollusk's soul-shaking, upper-class, high-toned shudder shook it into a sharp attack of syncope, from which it was with difficulty that Dr. Lobster's ministrations rallied it.
"Call yourself a nurse?" said the Doctor to Mrs. Crab. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. How would you like to be compared to a whelk or a winkle? You and your mussels! Consider the gentleman's feelings!"
"I didn't say mussels—I said mossels," muttered Nurse Crab, sullenly.
"Well, well," quoth the Lobster. "You take my advice,
And I fancy we'll do without Huxley or Bryce.
Mere mussels or mackerel, lower-class grub,
That flounder in baskets, or flop in a tub,
At six for a shilling, or tuppence a pound,
May go sick if they like, but we must bring you round!"
[And Mr. Punch hopes they will.