Chapter LXXXII

The belly and the members of the human body were in a riot. (This is not the riot recorded by an inferior writer, but a more notable and authentic one.) After exhausting the well-known arguments, they had recourse to the appropriate threat, when the man to whom they belonged thought it time for _him_ to be heard, in his capacity as a unit.

"Deuce take you!" he roared. "Things have come to a pretty pass if a fellow cannot walk out of a fine morning without alarming the town by a disgraceful squabble between his component parts! I am reasonably impartial, I hope, but man's devotion is due to his deity: I espouse the cause of my belly."

Hearing this, the members were thrown into so extraordinary confusion that the man was arrested for a windmill.

As a rule, don't "take sides." Sides of bacon, however, may be temperately acquired.