INVALID TOURING OPPORTUNITY.--Your idea of personally conducting
a party of paralytics, cripples, and other helpless invalids on a
"flying Continental trip," in which you propose including visits to
all the recognised "Cures," either by baths or drinking waters in
Europe, strikes us as quite admirable, and the further advantages you
offer in the shape of your being accompanied by six Bath-chairs, a
donkey, a massage doctor, a galvanising machine, fire-escape, and
a hearse, seem to meet the demands of the most nervous and exacting
patients more than half way. Your provision, too, for the recreation
of your party--such an important consideration where the nerves have
been shattered and the health feeble--by the engagement of a Learned
Musical and Calculating Pig, and a couple of Ethiopian Pashas, who
can munch and swallow half-a-dozen wine-glasses, and, if requested,
remove their eye-balls, seems to offer a prospect of many an evening's
startling and even boisterous amusement; and if the Pig should have
been palmed off on you by fraud, you not having found it able to
"calculate" at all, or even select with its snout a number _not
previously fastened to a piece of onion_, though assisted in its
selection, according to the directions, "with a smart prod with a
carving-fork," there still, as you truly say, remains the alternative
of disposing of it advantageously to some German sausage-maker. As to
the Ethiopian Pashas, if their feats, as is just possible, shock and
horrify, rather than divert and amuse your invalid audience, you can,
as you suggest, easily leave them behind on your way, in settlement
of one of your largest hotel bills. Let us know when you start. Your
"half-dozen paralytics" being let down in a horse-box by a crane on to
the boat, ought to create quite a sensation, and we shall certainly be
on the look-out for it.
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