The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864, page 189 by Various Authors
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rovise or to interchange organs, just as need calls. Thus a polyp, if hard put to it, may shift what little brain and stomach happen to be in his possession. You may say that he carries his heart in his hand. He can take his stomach, and dump it down in brain-case or thorax, just as he fancies,--can organize viscera and victory anywhere, at any moment; and all works merrily. The Fatless was similar, yet different. His stomach changed not its local habitation, was never victorious; yet, from cap to boot, it was ubiquitous and despotic. Brain and heel alike felt themselves to be mere squatters on another's soil, and had a vague idea that the rightful lord might some day come to oust them, and build up a new capital in these far-away districts. Sometimes they went so far as to style themselves his proconsuls and lieutenants, but they were never suffered to do more than simply to register the decrees of the central power. Düspeptos was king only in name,--roi fainéant. Gaster was the power behind the throne,--the Mayor of the Palace,--the great Grand-Vizier. Nought went merrily, for he ruled with a rod of iron. Every day his strange freaks set the empire topsy-turvy. Every day there was growling and ill-feeling at his whimsical tyranny,--but nothing more. Secession was as impossible as in the day of Menenius Agrippa.
Looking at it another way, Gaster might be called the object-glass through which Düspeptos looked out upon the world,--a glass always bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision, would have been the Chinese form of greeting: "How is your stomach? Have you eaten your rice?" or, perhaps, the Egyptian style: "How do you perspire?" With him, the peptic bond was the only real one; all others were shams. All sin was peptic in origin: Eve ate an apple which d