ste like an impossible sandwich made by a ghostly
baker from a disappearing bread and phantom?"

"Keno!"

"Does your nerve center tinkle-tinkle like a breakfast bell in a
kitchenless boarding house?"

"Right again!"

"Have you a feeling that the germs have attacked your Adam's apple and
that there won't be any core?"

"Yes!"

"When you look at the wall paper does your brain do a sort of
loop-the-loop and cause you to meld 100 aces or double pinochle?"

"Yes, and 80 kings, too!"

"Do you feel a slight palpitation of the membrane of the colorado madura
and is there a confused murmur in your brain like the sound of a
hard-working gas meter?"

"You've got me sized good and plenty, Doc!"

"Do you have insomnia, nightmare, loss of appetite, chills and fever and
concealed respiration in the Carolina perfecto?"

"That's the idea, Doc."

"When you lay on your right side do you have an impulse to turn over on
your left side, and when you turn over on your left side do you feel an
impulse to jump out of bed and throw stones at a policeman?"

"There isn't anything you can mention, Doc, that I haven't got."

"Ah!" said the doctor; "then that settles it."

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

"You have something worse--you have the grip," Doc Leiser 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
winter.

Then my friends and relatives began to drop in and annoy me with
suggestions.

"Pop" Barclay sat by my bedside and, after I had barked for him two or
three times, he decided I had inflammation of the lungs and was
insistent that I tie a rubber band around my chest and rub myself with
gasolene.

I told Pop I had no desire to become a human automobile so he got mad
and went home. But before he got mad he drank six bottles of beer and
before he went home he invited himself back to dinner.

Then Hep Hardy dropped in and ten minutes later he had me making signs
for an undertaker.

Hep comes to the bedside of the afflicted in the same restful manner
that a buzz-saw associates with a log of pine.

He insisted upon taking my pulse and listening to my heart beats, but
wh