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.