“Have some coffee, Mr. Bore?”

“No, I thank you, Madame Sans-Gene.  I like coffee, but it doesn’t like me!”

Irritating, maddeningly reiterated words—­the trade-mark of the dyspeptic bore!  I feel like saying, “I agree with the coffee. I don’t like you either!”

A dyspeptic disagrees with me as religiously as if I had eaten him.

No wonder a man is ill who never thinks or talks of anything but the seat of his ailment, for talk about it he will, and tell you that he cannot eat hot breads or pastry or griddle-cakes or waffles.  And if any of those adorable things which your soul loves are on the table, he will sit and watch you eat them, with his hand on his own pulse, and will entertain you with cheerful statements of how he would be feeling if he were eating any of the deadly poisons, until it nearly gives you indigestion to hear him describe it.

I dare say I know plenty of women dyspeptics, as long as dyspepsia is said to be our national ailment, but if I do I never hear them talk about it.

Of course every woman knows that a sick man is sicker than a thousand sick women, each of whom is twice as sick as he is.  We all know that he can groan louder and roll his eyes higher and keep more people flying about, and all this with just a plain pain, than his wife would do with seven fatal ailments.  Then to hear him tell about it, after he has recovered, is to imagine that he is Lazarus over again, and that the day of miracles has returned, that he ever lived to tell the tale.  All this refers to an acute attack.  But when his trouble is chronic, and it has to do, like dyspepsia, with a man’s eating!—­you cannot escape.  He will tell you all about it.

In the first place, dyspepsia is such a refined and lady-like trouble.  It has no disgusting details.  You can refer to it at all times without fear of nauseating your hearers.  In the second place, you can count on nearly half of your hearers having it too, as dyspepsia is almost as catching as Christian Science.

Carlyle was the most famous of dyspeptics.  But magnificent as he was in his growling, I fancy it is more bearable to read about it than it was for that adorable wife of his to hear him talk about it.  How well we can imagine her feelings when she wrote, “The amount of bile that he brings home is awfully grand.”

But one forgives much of his dyspeptic talk, and even allows the mantle of one’s Christian charity to cover the sins of lesser bile-cursed men to hear how he sums up the subject: 

“With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.  But what, in these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the liver?  Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold.  There, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the devil and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect.”