All our readers, of course, have heard of the Water Cure; and many of them, we doubt not, have in their own minds ranked it among those eccentric medical systems which now and then spring up. are much talked of for a while, and finally sink into oblivion.  The mention of the Water Cure is suggestive of galvanism, homoepathy, mesmerism, the grape cure, the bread cure, the mud-bath cure, and of the views of that gentleman who maintained that almost all the evils, physical and moral, which assail the constitution of man, are the result of the use of salt as an article of food, and may be avoided by ceasing to employ that poisonous and immoral ingredient.  Perhaps there is a still more unlucky association with life pills, universal vegetable medicines, and the other appliances of that coarser quackery which yearly brings hundreds of gullible Britons to their graves, and contributes thousands of pounds in the form of stamp-duty to the revenue of this great and enlightened country.

It is a curious phase of life that is presented at a Water Cure establishment.  The Water Cure system cannot be carried out satisfactorily except at an establishment prepared for the purpose.  An expensive array of baths is necessary; so are well-trained bath servants, and an experienced medical man to watch the process of cure:  the mode of life does not suit the arrangements of a family, and the listlessness of mind attendant on the water-system quite unfits a man for any active employment.  There must be pure country air to breathe, a plentiful supply of the best water, abundant means of taking exercise—­Sir E. B. Lytton goes the length of maintaining that mountains to climb are indispensable;—­and to enjoy all these advantages one must go to a hydropathic establishment.  It may be supposed that many odd people are to be met at such a place; strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends’ kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all.  And the change of life is total.  You may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, but at the Water Cure you must perforce practise total abstinence.  For years you may never have tasted fair water, but here you will get nothing else to drink, and you will have to dispose of your seven or eight tumblers a day.  You may have been accustomed to loll in bed of a morning till nine or ten o’clock; but here you must imitate those who would thrive, and ‘rise at five:’  while the exertion is compensated by your having to bundle off to your chamber at 9.30 p.  M. You may long at breakfast for your hot tea, and if a Scotchman, for your grouse pie or devilled kidneys; but you will be obliged to make up with the simpler refreshment of bread and milk,