old-fashioned Christmas weather, when you can
step out of a sultry dining-room into a world of
Polar ice and snow. Coryzas delight in abrupt
contrasts. They prefer a careless to a careful
costume. If you seek them lightly clad, with
uncovered head, open shirt-collar, and unbuttoned
waistcoat, they will meet you half way.

You are notorious for the narrowness of your
understanding— I mean, for the smallness of
your feet. Incase them, by all means, to show
them off, with fine cotton stockings, in the
tightest of boots with the thinnest of soles.
Walk in them, through a sloppy thaw, from St.
James's Park to Primrose-hill and back, and you
may possibly bring home with you a very fair
and promising coryza. Or, you are a boat-racer,
pulling as no man of Cambridge or Oxford ever
pulled before. After a longer pull than usual,
retire to a meadow to refresh your blood. Lie
down beneath a tree, stretching your stalwart
length on the grass. Take particular care to
go to sleep. When you wake, it will not be
your fault if you have not a strong coryza. Once,
on a hot summer's day, I climbed the Apennine
on foot, starting from the Bologna side. On
reaching the summit, I mounted the box of a
carriage, to enjoy the more extensive view and
admit the refreshing breeze to my open chest. I
saw no coryza on the mountain-top; the thought
of coryzas never entered my head. Nevertheless,
I carried into Florence as charming a coryza
as you would wish to have.

The presence of a coryza, when caught, is
frequently betrayed by a convulsive cry or
exclamation which no amount of self-restraint can
suppress. When you hear repeated sounds
resembling " Chishoh! chishoh!" be sure that a
coryza is not far off. " Itch-ho!" is another
orthographical mode of expressing the same
thing. A Muscovite variety of the species
modifies the above syllables into "Tchischoff!
Tchischoff!" A Polish nobleman, who was
never without a good coryza, was thence
surnamed the Count Tchischoffinski, which made
his wife the Countess Tchischoffinska. The cry
may be mechanically imitated by introducing to
the human nostril finely ground pepper,
comminuted tobacco-leaves, or any other pulverulent
stimulus. Some nostrils, however, have become
so indurated and coriaceous— in trivial language,
leathery— that no amount of powdery excitement
is able to startle them from their propriety.
They bid defiance to dusty provocation. Still
the insensible proboscis may be made to give
galvanic signs of life, if its proprietor will only
throw back his head and look at the sun fixedly.

As the cuckoo is named after its cry, in all
nations and languages, so by a pleasing
onomatopeia, in certain nurseries, coryzas are known
by the sound they elicit. Biddy says to little
Tom, " Oh! Master Tommy, you have caught
a chisho." To which accusation Tommy replies,
"Chisho! Yes, I have," or, " Chisho! No, I
haven't," according to his habits of truth or
untruth. The oldest inhabitant of Drafton Attics
states that, in his young days, coryzas were
ealled "the sneezums," and that it was
customary to exorcise the enemy thus made
manifest, by a counter exclamation, viz. " God bless
you!"

Coryzas have also a habit of imitating, and at
the same time corrupting, human speech. They
delight in abusing the etymological doctrine of
the convertibility of certain letters. B. they
make do duty for M. Biddy, under the influence
of chisho, would say, " Oh, Tobby!
Naughty Tobby! You bustn't bake bouths at
your Babba!" A French savant, M. Edmond
About, in his wonderful romance of The Nose
of a Notary, publishes the discovery that coryzas
speak pure Auvergnat— i.e. the patois of the
province of Auvergne. In Great Britain, the
coryza dialect has been held to bear a relationship
to the modern Jewish. At the same time
with the vitiation of speech, coryza's taste is
vitiated. It cannot tell the difference between
plum-pudding and toasted cheese. It takes
roast pork for boiled veal, and curried fowl for
harricoed mutton. By sight only can it differentiate
fish from flesh, and flesh from fowl. The
same of smells; it is equally insensible to the
perfume of the rose and the odour of over-kept
venison.

The reader has by this time guessed that what
the Grecian gods call coryza, and humble men
"a cold in the head," is no other than the
Rhinitis of nosologists, the Rheum of our
ancestors, the Nasal Catarrh of apothecaries,
and the Gravedo of Latin authors. The very
names by which it has been currently known—
pose, mur, stuffing of the head, distillation into
the eyes and nose, all producing unusual stolidity
and heaviness in the bewildered patient— mark it
as helplessly ridiculous and pitiable. The doctor
despises it, as bringing neither glory nor profit
to him, but as only increasing the figures which
stand before "handkerchiefs" in the washer-
woman's bill. Complain to your medical man
of a cold in the head, and what comfort will he
give you? Pooh! It is a trifle. It is a
common, temporary indisposition, of no importance
in the world, except as a subject for jokes,
to be cauterised with a caricature, or blistered
with an epigram. Men are wicked enough to
laugh at anything. Tie a tin kettle to a poor
dog's tail, and you will see every individual
passenger highly amused at the animal's fright;
forgetting that he may go mad and give them
a serious fright in turn. But imagine the position
of the man who has to make a declaration of
love, or his maiden speech in the House of
Commons, or his first pleading at the bar, with his
nasal appendage— I shudder to write it—
"stuffed up" with a horrid coryza. Fancy the
sufferings of the Japanese, with their pockets
full of smooth paper wipers only; fancy the
awful destitution of those to whom fortune
refuses a kerchief of any kind!

You may get the master of a cramp, you may
bear a toothache or have your tooth out, you may
conquer a twinge of threatened gout, you may
subdue your anger and other evil passions; but a
well-established cold in the head, resisting your
utmost efforts, makes you half stupid in spite of