But by this time we can imagine our readers asking with some impatience, what is the Water Cure?  What is the precise nature of all those oddly-named appliances by which it produces its results?  Now this is just what we are going to explain; but we have artfully and deeply sought to set out the benefits ascribed to the system before doing so, in the hope that that large portion of the human race which reads Fraser may feel the greater interest in the details which follow, when each of the individuals who compose it remembers, that these sitzes and douches are not merely the things which set up Sir E. B. Lytton, Mr. Lane, and our old military friend, but are the things which may some day be called on to revive his own sinking strength and his own drooping spirits.  And as the treatment to which all water patients are subjected appears to be much the same, we shall best explain the nature of the various baths by describing them as we ourselves found them.

Our story is a very simple one.  Some years since, after many terms of hard College work, we found our strength completely break down.  We were languid and dispirited; everything was an effort:  we felt that whether study in our case had ‘made the mind’ or not, it had certainly accomplished the other result which Festus ascribes to it, and ‘unmade the body.’  We tried sea-bathing, cod-liver oil, and everything else that medical men prescribe to people done up by over study; but nothing did much good.  Finally, we determined to throw physic to the dogs, and to try a couple of months at the Water Cure.  It does cost an effort to make up one’s mind to go there, not only because the inexperienced in the matter fancy the water system a very perilous one, but also because one’s steady-going friends, on hearing of our purpose, are apt to shake their heads,—­perhaps even to tap their foreheads,—­to speak doubtfully of our common sense, and express a kind hope—­behind our backs, especially—­that we are not growing fanciful and hypochondriac, and that we may not end in writing testimonials in favour of Professor Holloway.  We have already said that to have the full benefit of the Water Cure, one must go to a hydropathic establishment.  There are numbers of these in Germany, and all along the Rhine; and there are several in England, which are conducted in a way more accordant with our English ideas.  At Malvern we believe there are two; there is a large one at Ben Rhydding, in Yorkshire; one at Sudbrook Park, between Richmond and Ham; and another at Moor Park, near Farnham.  Its vicinity to London led us to prefer the one at Sudbrook; and on a beautiful evening in the middle of May we found our way down through that garden-like country, so green and rich to our eyes, long accustomed to the colder landscapes of the north.  Sudbrook Park is a noble place.  The grounds stretch for a mile or more along Richmond Park, from which they are separated only by a wire fence; the trees are magnificent, the growth of centuries,