on was at
fault. Mentally, I found myself--well, for lack of a better word to
express it--logy. Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk and
peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance of having reached the age
when a great many of us are confronted by the distressing discovery that
we are rapidly getting no younger.

Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously perfect health as
it has been my good fortune to enjoy takes note that certain nagging
manifestations are persisting within him it is his duty, or least it
should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying cause of whatever
it is that distresses him and correct the trouble before it becomes
chronic.

I did not get frightened--I trust I am not a self-alarmist--but I did get
worried. I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who approach
middle age so often do, for the medical examiner of an insurance company
to scare me into sudden conniption fits. But I also made up my mind that I
would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor
to master it while the mastering was good.

This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I
was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North
American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed
intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily
languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of
malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's,
jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a
strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course
of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand. Recalling these
early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present
symptoms--if symptoms they were. I took quinine until my ears rang so that
persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the
chimes. My head was filled with mysterious muffled rumblings. It was like
living in a haunted house and being one at the same time.

CHAPTER VII

_Office Visits, $10_

It required all of two weeks of experimenting with my interior to convince
me that whatever it might be that annoyed me, it surely was not a thing
which an intensive bombardment of the liver would cure. The liver has a
low visibility but is easy to hit.

I had the aversion to seeking professional guidance for the c