ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
INVALID TOURING OPPORTUNITY.—Your idea of personally conducting a party of paralytics, cripples, and other helpless invalids on a "flying Continental trip," in which you propose including visits to all the recognised "Cures," either by baths or drinking waters in Europe, strikes us as quite admirable, and the further advantages you offer in the shape of your being accompanied by six Bath-chairs, a donkey, a massage doctor, a galvanising machine, fire-escape, and a hearse, seem to meet the demands of the most nervous and exacting patients more than half way. Your provision, too, for the recreation of your party—such an important consideration where the nerves have been shattered and the health feeble—by the engagement of a Learned Musical and Calculating Pig, and a couple of Ethiopian Pashas, who can munch and swallow half-a-dozen wine-glasses, and, if requested, remove their eye-balls, seems to offer a prospect of many an evening's startling and even boisterous amusement; and if the Pig should have been palmed off on you by fraud, you not having found it able to "calculate" at all, or even select with its snout a number not previously fastened to a piece of onion, though assisted in its selection, according to the directions, "with a smart prod with a carving-fork," there still, as you truly say, remains the alternative of disposing of it advantageously to some German sausage-maker. As to the Ethiopian Pashas, if their feats, as is just possible, shock and horrify, rather than divert and amuse your invalid audience, you can, as you suggest, easily leave them behind on your way, in settlement of one of your largest hotel bills. Let us know when you start. Your "half-dozen paralytics" being let down in a horse-box by a crane on to the boat, ought to create quite a sensation, and we shall certainly be on the look-out for it.
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