lord and lady, and their undying appreciation
of the good that lay in them; they resumed
their natural balance, and were no longer
cephalopods but honest bipeds, such as Nature had
made them; but they flattened their own noses
in the process irretrievably. The Scotch doctor
of the establishment called them pawky; my
Lord Fivestars said they were scrubby; and my
lady, with more delicacy if less discrimination,
sighed as she confessed they had grown unpleasant,
and she did not know what had come to
them, they were so changed. In fact, their noses
were falling out of joint by their own weight,
when the introduction of their friends Mr. and
Mrs. Dash completed the dislocation. Mr. and
Mrs. Dash were newer, cleverer, more versatile,
and more vivacious than the Blanks. They had
talent in the histrionic line (my Lord and Lady
Fivestars were great patrons of talent in all
lines), and they could amuse a dinner-table or
a supper party better than could Mr. Blank
with his artistic hair, and his tepid réchauffé of
Ruskin very weakly done, or than Mrs. Blank
with her political lectures and awful enthusiasm
for "causes." And so they flattened their dear
friends' the Blanks' noses straight to their faces,
and Lord and Lady Fivestars never even tried
to raise them up again. But ever after this the
Blanks became tremendous democrats; and the
"insolence of a bloated aristocracy" was a kind
of monogram sealing Corinna's effusions with
the indelible and undeniable stamp of ownership.

The Blanks did the same kind of thing on
their side; for, as the humblest parasite has a
humbler parasite still battening upon its
translated juices, so the most devoted toadies have
their own toadies a step lower; and the noses
that get put out of joint in the drawing-room,
tweak others awry in the lobby. The Blanks
had their pet, young Silvertongue of the R. I. O.,
whom they patronised considerably, and about
whom they rejoiced to talk nonsense and
prophesy absurdities, after the manner of those
who delight in reflected lights, whether from
above their heads or beneath their feet. But
his nose was put out of joint, just as theirs had
been at Fivestars Court. Mr. Minim, also of
the R. I. O., was one day, unluckily for poor
Silvertongue, introduced to the Blanks, where
he sang bass to the younger man's tenor, and
carried it clean over his head by the strength of
more sonorous vocal chords, and a more generous
laryngeal arrangement. Henceforth it was
Minim and not Silvertongue who was to
revolutionise the musical world with the voice of an
Apollo in a circumscribed register. Silvertongue
was all very well, but his organ was
being impaired by injudicious work; it had
grown woolly, it had become metallic, it was
tinkling, it was husky, it was harsh, it was
piping, it was everything but what it had been
when his nose went straight on end to the skies,
and before Minim threw his masculine vocalisation
into the adverse scale. Now Minim was
everything, and Lablache and Ronconi were
nowhere. I need hardly say that no one shared
in this reputation of the Blanks. I never knew
of either gentleman coming out from the ruck
of the chorus at the wings, where they did their
business satisfactorily but in no wise remarkably,
certainly free from censure by the authorities,
but quite as free from praise.

This kind of nasal see-saw is very common
with public men—the popular preacher, the
fashionable doctor, the favourite author, or the
beloved of the opera-house or the theatre. For a
long time Mr. Whiteband is the minister under
whose ghostly training you are making yourself
a Christian athlete, ready and able for any
amount of combats with Apollyon and his crew.
No one is equal to him in power, or grace, or
unction; he stirs your heart as no one else has
done, he softens your conscience and
enlightens your understanding, and you feel that
the grace of a soul redeemed is due mainly to
Mr. Whiteband, and his precious discourses.
But one day you are induced to go and hear
Mr. Blackhood. He too is a ghostly trainer of
note, and has done wonders in his time, and
with sinners more hardened than yourself.
You go to hear him, and you are struck; you
go again, and you are knocked down; and by
that blow, which prostrates your inner being,
Mr. Blackhood flattens Mr. Whiteband' s nose
and puts it out of joint definitively. You
transfer your congregational allegiance; you
vacate your long accustomed seat; you go
through spiritual exercises of quite a different
character, but which you declare to be more
bracing, and better suited to your special condition:
and Mr. Whiteband is left to mourn a
defection of which he understands nothing;
knowing only this, which is poor consolation at
the best, that it has been by no fault of his own he
has lost his adherent, and had his ministerial
nose put out of joint so cruelly.

So it is with your doctor—the man into
whose broad bosom you have poured out
your secrets—the tale of your husband's ill
temper and your children's undesirable
proclivities, and Mary Jane's impertinence, and
Amelia Ann's cousin in the Life Guards—
the man whose very presence you have often
declared gave you life, and for whose daily
coming you have looked, as a fire-worshipper
looks for the rising of the sun. All this and
more has your favourite doctor been to you,
for the space of months or years, according to
the natural muscularity of your constancy. And
then your friends persuade you to try the treatment
of another medical hero, and one of their
own adoring. Nothing will do for you but a total
change of system, plunging from Turkish baths
to cold douches, or from the horse play of the
Allopaths of Dr. Sangrado's school to the subtle
essences of homœopathy, which you swallow by
faith not knowledge. You do so: perhaps with no
result: perhaps with decidedly evil results; but
you do not retreat. You may change and
change again, and never be fixed with a medical
attendant firmly rooted all your life after, but
you will scarcely go back to the old broken
nose love—for noses once broken are hard to
mend, and no one likes to consort with them