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insidious?] plant was not revealed to me until after the harm was done. I awoke one night to find my hands and wrists afflicted with so pestiferous an itching that it verily seemed to me as if the points of ten thousand thousand hot needles were being thrust into my cuticle. There are no words capable of expressing how torturesome this affliction is; to my physical suffering there was added a distinct mental disquietude arising from a sense of injustice that nature, supposed to be so benignant to her friends, should have punished me so grievously for having sought to cultivate and foster her arts. I was shocked, too, to discover that my misfortune awakened no feeling of sympathy in others; nay, my neighbors seemed to regard it rather as a joke that I, a scientist of no mean ability (if I _do_ say it myself), should have fallen victim to the commonest and most vicious of all destroyers of human happiness. The amount of badinage, sarcasm, and irony indulged in by these unfeeling folk at the expense of "Farmer" Baker (as they now jocosely dubbed me) would fill a royal octavo volume. I assure you that I regarded this species of humor as impertinent to the degree of atrocity. My family physician, Dr. Hodges, prescribed several vials of pellets which bore a striking resemblance to one another, but whose virtues I was solemnly assured depended wholly upon my strict observance of the _ordo_ of their administration internally, which _ordo_ may have been simple and clear enough to Dr. Hodges, but was to me as intricate and complicated as a Bradshaw railway guide. Furthermore, having ascertained by artful inquiry what viands and beverages I particularly liked, Dr. Hodges strictly forbade my indulgence in them, and such articles of food and drink as I was particularly averse to be recommended for my diet. Meanwhile I was meeting constantly with people who had been afflicted with ivy poisoning, and these kind, cheery souls encouraged me with recitals of their experiences. I was told that it took seven years for ivy poison to get out of the system; that every year during the ivy season (whatever that may mean) there would be a recurrence of this pestiferous eruption, sometimes in one part of the body, sometimes in another, and not unfrequently upon the whole surface. There were, of course, numerous nostrums warranted to allay the fiery tingling and maddening stinging of the malady, and, as I cheerfully adopted every sugg
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