ful.
Agony was bliss alongside of the pangs that now afflicted him and all
the palliatives and pain killers known to man were tried without avail,
and then, just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur
cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the
Lost Chord. A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the
Lost Chord the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals
seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and
physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded the internal
disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away
entirely, leaving him so far from prostrated that by one A.M. he was out
of bed and actually girding himself with a shotgun and an Indian Club to
go upstairs for a physical encounter with the cornetist."

"And you reason from this that Sullivan's Lost Chord is a cure for
Cholera morbus, eh?" sneered the Doctor.

"It would seem so," said the Idiot. "While the music continued my friend
was a well man ready to go out and fight like a warrior, but when the
cornetist stopped--the colic returned and he had to fight it out in the
old way. In these episodes in my own experience I find ample
justification for my belief and that of others that some day the music
cure for human ailments will be recognized and developed to the full.
Families going off to the country for the summer instead of taking a
medicine-chest along with them will go provided with a music-box with
cylinders for mumps, measles, summer complaint, whooping-cough,
chicken-pox, chills and fever and all the other ills the flesh is heir
to. Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long what composition
will cure specific ills. If a baby has whooping-cough, an anxious
mother, instead of ringing up the Doctor, will go to the piano and give
the child a dose of Hiawatha. If a small boy goes swimming and catches a
cold in his head and is down with a fever, his nurse, an expert on the
accordeon, can bring him back to health again with three bars of Under
the Bamboo Tree after each meal. Instead of dosing kids with cod liver
oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work at a mechanical
piano and braced up on Narcissus. There'll Be a Hot Time In The Old Town
To-Night will become an effective remedy for a sudden chill. People
suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves back to normal
conditions again with Wagner the way I did. Tchaik