Get Next! Part 5

"Tell me the truth, Doctor!" I groaned; "what is it, bubonic plague?"

"You have something worse--you have the grip," he whispered gently.

"You see I tried hard to mention some symptom which you didn't have, but you had them all, and the grip is the only disease in the world which makes a specialty of having every symptom known to medical jurisprudence."

Then the doctor got busy with the pencil gag and left me enough prescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket money throughout the summer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Enough prescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket money throughout the summer.]

Later my wife came in and asked me how I felt, and when I began to discourse amiably about undertakers she put up a howl that brought the rest of the family around the bedside on a hurry call.

When I told them I had the grip each and every member of the household from Uncle Peter down to the cook began to suggest remedies, and if I had taken half they suggested they could have sold me to a junk dealer and got good money.

That evening our next door neighbor, Bud Taylor, came in and advised me to take quinine and whiskey every time I felt a shooting pain.

I took his advice, but at the end of the first hour the score was 98 to 37 in favor of the shooting pains, and the whiskey had such an effect on the quinine that it made the germs jealous, so between them they cooked up a little black man who advised me to chase Bud out of the house, which I did by throwing medicine bottles at him.

That night the whiskey and quinine held a director's meeting with the germs and then they wound up with a sort of Mardi Gras parade through my system.

I was the goat!

When daylight broke I was a total wreck, and I swore that the next person that said whiskey and quinine to me would get all his.

After breakfast another friend of ours, Jack Gibson, blew in, and after he looked me over his weary eye fell on the decanter.

Then Jack smacked his lips and whispered that the best cure for the grip was a gla.s.s of whiskey and quinine every time I felt chills and fever, and he'd be glad to join me.

When loving hands picked Jack up at the bottom of the stairs he was almost insulted, but he quieted down when my wife explained to him that I was suffering not only from the grip but that I had also a slight attack of jiu jitsu.

After weeks of study devoted to the subject I have come to the conclusion that the only way to cure the grip is to stay sick until you get better.

That's what I did!

JOHN HENRY ON COURTING

Are you wise to the fact that everything is changing in this old world of ours, and that since the advent of fuss-wagons even the old-fas.h.i.+oned idea of courts.h.i.+p has been chased to the woods?

It used to be that on a Sat.u.r.day evening the young gent would draw down his six dollars worth of salary and chase himself to the barber shop, where the Dago lawn trimmer would put a crimp in his moustache and plaster his forehead with three cents worth of hair and a dollar's worth of axle-grease.

Then the young gent would go out and spread 40 cents around among the tradesmen for a mess of water-lilies and a bag of peanut brittle.

The lilies of the valley were to put on the dining-room table so mother would be pleased, and with the peanut brittle he intended to fill in the weary moments when he and his little geisha girl were not making googoo eyes at each other.

But nowadays it is different, and Dan Cupid spends most of his time on the hot foot between the coroner's office and the divorce court.

I've got a hunch that young people these days are more emotional and like to see their pictures in the newspapers.

Nowadays when a clever young man goes to visit his sweetheart he hikes over the streets in a benzine buggy, and when he pulls the bell-rope at the front door he has a rapid fire revolver in one pocket and a bottle of carbolic acid in the other.

His intentions are honorable and he wishes to prove them so by shooting his lady love if she renigs when he makes a play for her hand.

I think the old style was the best, because when young people quarreled they didn't need an ambulance and a hospital surgeon to help them make up.

In the old days Oscar Dobson would draw the stove brush cheerfully across his dog-skin shoes and rush with eager feet to see Lena Jones, the girl he wished to make the wife of his bosom.

"Darling!" Oscar would say, "I am sure to the bad for love of you.

Pipe the downcast droop in this eye of mine and notice the way my heart is bubbling over like a bottle of sarsaparilla on a hot day!

Be mine, Lena! be mine!"

Then Lena would giggle. Not once, but seven giggles, something like those used in a spasm.

Then she would reply, "No, Oscar; it cannot be. Fate wills it otherwise."

Then Oscar would bite his finger nails, pick his hat up out of the coal-scuttle and say to Lena, "False one! You love Conrad, the floorwalker in the butcher shop. Curses on Conrad, and see what you have missed, Lena. I have tickets for a swell chowder party next Tuesday. Ah! farewell forever!"

Then Oscar would walk out and hunt up one of those places that Carrie Nation missed in the shuffle and there, with one arm glued tight around the bar rail, he would fasten his system to a jag which would last for a week.

Despair would grab him and he'd be Oscar with the souse thing for sure.

When he would recover strength enough to walk down town without attracting the attention of the other side of the street, he would call on Lena and say, "Lena, forgive me for what I done, but love is blind--and, besides, I mixed my drinks. Lena, I was on the downward path and I nearly went to h.e.l.l."

Then Lena would say, "Why, Oscar, I saw you and your bundle when you fell in the well, but I didn't know it was as deep as you mention."

Then they would kiss and make up, and the wedding bells would ring just as soon as Oscar's salary grew large enough to tease a pocketbook.

But these days the idea is altogether different.

Children are hardly out of the cradle before they are arrested for b.u.t.ting into the speed limit with a smoke wagon.

Even when they go courting they have to play to the gallery.

Nowadays Gonsalvo H. Puffenlotz walks into the parlor to see Miss Imogene Cordelia Hoffbrew.

"Wie gehts, Imogene!" says Gonsalvo.

"Simlich!" says Imogene, standing at right angles near the piano because she thinks she is a Gibson girl.

"Imogene, dearest," Gonsalvo continues; "I called on your papa in Wall Street yesterday to find out how much money you have, but he refused to name the sum, therefore you have untold wealth!"

Gonsalvo pauses to let the Parisian clock on the mantle tick, tick, tick!

He is making the bluff of his life you see, and he has to do even that on tick.

Besides, this furnishes the local color.

Then Gonsalvo bursts forth again, "Imogene! Oh! Imogene! Will you be mine and I will be thine without money and without the price."