“’Orrible discovery at Sidcup!”

I turned wrathfully—­for a London street-boy’s yell, let off at point-blank range, is, in effect, like the smack of an open hand—­but the inscription on the staring yellow poster that was held up for my inspection changed my anger into curiosity.

“Horrible discovery in a watercress-bed!”

Now, let, prigs deny it if they will, but there is something very attractive in a “horrible discovery.”  It hints at tragedy, at mystery, at romance.  It promises to bring into our grey and commonplace life that element of the dramatic which is the salt that our existence is savoured withal.  “In a watercress-bed,” too!  The rusticity of the background seemed to emphasise the horror of the discovery, whatever it might be.

I bought a copy of the paper, and, tucking it under my arm, hurried on to the surgery, promising myself a mental feast of watercress; but as I opened the door I found myself confronted by a corpulent woman of piebald and pimply aspect who saluted me with a deep groan.  It was the lady from the coal shop in Fleur-de-Lys Court.

“Good evening, Mrs. Jablett,” I said briskly; “not come about yourself, I hope.”

“Yes, I have,” she answered, rising and following me gloomily into the consulting-room; and then, when I had seated her in the patient’s chair and myself at the writing-table, she continued:  “It’s my inside, you know, Doctor.”

The statement lacked anatomical precision and merely excluded the domain of the skin specialist.  I accordingly waited for enlightenment and speculated on the watercress-beds, while Mrs. Jablett regarded me expectantly with a dim and watery eye.

“Ah!” I said, at length; “it’s your—­your inside, is it, Mrs. Jablett?”

“Yus. And my ’ead,” she added, with a voluminous sigh that filled the apartment with odorous reminiscences of “unsweetened.”

“Your head aches, does it?”

“Somethink chronic!” said Mrs. Jablett.  “Feels as if it was a-opening and a-shutting, a-opening and a-shutting, and when I sit down I feel as if I should bust.”

This picturesque description of her sensations—­not wholly inconsistent with her figure—­gave the clue to Mrs. Jablett’s sufferings.  Resisting a frivolous impulse to reassure her as to the elasticity of the human integument, I considered her case in exhaustive detail, coasting delicately round the subject of “unsweetened,” and finally sent her away, revived in spirits and grasping a bottle of Mist.  Sodae cum Bismutho from Barnard’s big stock-jar.  Then I went back to investigate the Horrible Discovery; but before I could open the paper, another patient arrived (Impetigo contagiosa, this time, affecting the “wide and arched-front sublime” of a juvenile Fetter Laner), and then yet another, and so on through the evening until, at last, I forgot the watercress-beds altogether.  It was only when I had purified myself from the evening consultations with hot water and a nail-brush and was about to sit down to a frugal supper, that I remembered the newspaper and fetched it from the drawer of the consulting-room table, where it had been hastily thrust out of sight.  I folded it into a convenient form, and, standing it upright against the water-jug, read the report at my ease as I supped.