Did the daredevil barber of Bristol ever realise, I wonder, the danger he was in every time he raised a fork with a piece of roast beef to his lips?  Either the beef might have choked him or it might have given him ptomaine poisoning, or, if it failed of either of these, there are at least half-a-dozen fatal diseases which vegetarians say are caused by eating it.  Even if we take for granted that there is little danger in plain beef, are there not curries and sausages and pork-pies on which a lover of risks may exercise his daring in the restaurants?  I know people who are afraid to eat fish on a Monday lest it may have gone bad over the week-end.  Others live in terror of mackerel and herrings.  I myself have always admired the gallantry of Londoners who go into a chance restaurant and order lobster or curried prawns.  Then there are all the tinned foods, a spoil for heroes.  I have known a V.C. who was frightened of tinned salmon.  And a man’s food is not more beset with perils than his drink.  Even if he confines himself to water, he is in danger at every sip.  If the water is too hard, it may deposit destruction in his arteries.  If it is too soft, it may give his child rickets.  Or it may be populous with germs and give him typhoid fever.  If, on the other hand, he is dissatisfied with the drink of the beasts and takes to beverages the use of which distinguishes men from oxen, what a nightmare procession of potential ills lies in wait for him!  You may read an account of them in any temperance tract.  The very enumeration of them would drive a weak man to water, if water itself were not suspect.  But, alas, even to breathe is to put oneself in danger.  There are more germs in a bus than there are stars in the firmament, and one cannot walk along the Strand without all sorts of bacilli shooting their little arrows at one at every breath.  If men realised these things—­truly realised them—­they would see that there is no need to go to the North Pole in order to live dangerously.  A walk from Charing Cross to St Paul’s would then be seen to be as rich in hairbreadth escapes as a voyage to an island of head-hunters.  The man who lives the most thrilling life I know is a man who rarely stirs beyond his garden.  Every time he is pricked by a thorn or gets a little earth in his finger-nail, he rushes into the house to bathe his hands in lysol and, for days afterwards, he keeps feeling his jaw to see whether it is stiffening with the first signs of tetanus.  He lives in a condition of recurrent alarm.  He gets more frights in a week than an ordinary traveller could get in a year.  I have often advised him to give up gardening, seeing that he finds it so exciting.  I have come to the conclusion, however, that he enjoys those half-hourly rushes to the lysol-bottle—­the desperate game of hide-and-seek with lockjaw.  He needs no barrel to roll him over Niagara in order to gaze into “the bright eyes of danger.”  He finds all the danger he wants at the root of the meanest brussels sprout that blows.