For contributions to the leading reviews, boiled pork and cabbage may be eaten, with bottled beer, followed by apple dumpling.  This effectually suppresses any tendency to facetiousness, or what respectable English people call double entendre, and brings you en rapport with the serious people who read these publications.  So soon as you begin to feel wakeful and restless discontinue writing.  For what is vulgarly known as the fin-de-siecle type of publication, on the other hand, one should limit oneself to an aerated bread shop for a week or so, with the exception of an occasional tea in a literary household.  All people fed mainly on scones become clever.  And this regimen, with an occasional debauch upon macaroons, chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily walks from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the Green Park, to Westminster and back, should result in an animated society satire.

It is not known what Mr. Kipling takes to make him so peculiar.  Many of us would like to know.  Possibly it is something he picked up in the jungle—­berries or something.  A friend who made a few tentative experiments to this end turned out nothing beyond a will, and that he dictated and left incomplete. (It was scarcely on the lines of an ordinary will, being blasphemous, and mentioning no property except his inside.) For short stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and hard biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science novel one should take an abundance of boiled rice and toast and water.

However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion.  Every writer in the end, so soon as his digestion is destroyed, must ascertain for himself the peculiar diet that suits him best—­that is, which disagrees with him the most.  If everything else fails he might try some chemical food.  “Jabber’s Food for Authors,” by the bye, well advertised, and with portraits of literary men, in their drawing-rooms, “Fed entirely on Jabber’s Food,” with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and favourable and expurgated reviews of works written on it, ought to be a brilliant success among literary aspirants.  A small but sufficient quantity of arsenic might with advantage be mixed in.

HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR AMUSEMENT

Since Adam and Eve went hand in hand out of the gates of Paradise, the world has travailed under an infinite succession of house-hunts.  To-day in every eligible suburb you may see New Adams and New Eves by the score, with rusty keys and pink order-forms in hand, wandering still, in search of the ideal home.  To them it is anything but an amusement.  Most of these poor pilgrims look simply tired, some are argumentative in addition, but all are disappointed, anxious, and unhappy, their hands dirty with prying among cisterns, and their garments soiled from cellar walls.  All, in the exaltation of the wooing days, saw at least the indistinct reflection of the perfect house, but now the Quest is irrevocably in hand they seek and do not find.  And such a momentous question it is to them.  Are they not choosing the background, the air and the colour, as it were, of the next three or four years, the cardinal years, too! of their lives?