"Have you tried chloraline?" I venture to suggest, mentioning not by that name, but by another, a much-advertised specific.
"I've been living on chloraline—that is when I wasn't taking camphor lozenges. But my symptoms are too strong for that kind o' stuff. Besides, I find that it's no use to fill yerself up with remedies, because they only weigh down the cough unnaturally, and then when it does bust out it's fit to tear yer throat in pieces. But none of them get be'ind it—no, not once."
It will be observed that Binns has almost a superstition in regard to "getting be'ind." If he got rid of his cough with everything still in front, he would take no satisfaction whatever in his malady; but as it is he feels a legitimate pride in it. He has been a member of this household for forty years, and punctually on the Kalends of March in every year his cough turns up. It never reduces his efficiency, but, while it alienates affection, it makes him more valuable to himself as being one who has symptoms capable of being related at full length to Mrs. Hankinson, the cook, or to any of the maids who have not yet experienced it and must be made aware that they belong to an establishment which has the high merit of accommodating John Binns's annual cough.
It is something to have a butler who has coughed his irresistible way through two-and-a-half generations. It is a perfectly harmless affliction, but it gets on nerves in the same way as it did when first it huicked and honked and strangled and choked in the seventies of last century. I can see no decrease in its vigour or its variety. It deserves the chance of immortality that I hereby offer it, thus giving it a place beside the cough that Johnson coughed at Dr. Blimber's famous establishment. It will be remembered that, when the Doctor began an excursus on the Romans, Johnson, "who happened to be drinking and who caught the Doctor's eye glaring at him through the side of his tumbler, left off so hastily that he was convulsed for some moments and in the sequel ruined Dr. Blimber's point." He struggled gallantly, but had in the end to give way to an overwhelming paroxysm of coughing. It was a good cough, but an isolated one, and was perhaps, after all, not equal to Binns's.
THE GOOD OLD TIMES.
Captain Reginald Jones and Captain James Smith, demobilised, meet accidentally in the waiting-room of a Government office. Their acquaintanceship had originated in a shell-hole near Plum-Tree Farm in 1916.
Reggie. Cheerio, old egg.
Jimmy. Same to you. Doing anything?
Reggie. Lord, yes! I've been pushed on to the directorate of the pater's firm.