"Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum, near the apex of the cosmopolitan?" inquired the doctor.
"Surest thing you know," I said.
"Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distant laughter in the panatella?" he asked.
"It"s a cinch, Doc," I said.
"Do you feel a roaring in the cornucopia with a tickling sensation in the diaphragm?" he asked.
"Right again," I whispered.
"Do the joints feel sore and pinched like a pool-room?" he said.
"Right!"
"Does your tongue feel rare and high-priced, like a porterhouse steak at a summer resort?"
"Exactly!"
"Do you feel a spasmodic fluttering in the concertina?"
"Yes!"
"Have you a sort of nervous hesitation in your hunger and does everything you eat taste 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 appet.i.te, 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 a.s.sociates with a log of pine.
He insisted upon taking my pulse and listening to my heart beats, but when he attempted to turn my eyelids back to see if I had a touch of the glanders every germ in my body rose in rebellion and together we chased Hep out of the room.
The next calamity was Teddy Pearson, who had an apartment on the floor above us. Teddy had spent the previous night at a Tango party and ever since daylight he had been beating home to windward. His cargo had shifted and the seaway was rough. Still clad in the black and white scenery with the silk bean-cover somewhat mussed he groped across the darkened room and solemnly shook hands with me.
Then he sat in a chair by the bedside and began to sing soft lullabies to a hold-over.
Presently he reached out his arm and made all the gestures that go with the act of hitting a bell to summon a waiter.
Receiving no answer to his thirsty appeal he arose and said, "This is a heluva club--rottenest service in this club--s"limit, that"s what it is, s"limit!" Then he hiccoughed his weary way out of the room and I haven"t seen him since.
An hour later Uncle Louis Miffendale had looked me over and concluded I had galloping asthma, compressed tonsilitis, chillblainous croup, and incipient measles. He insisted that I take three grains of quinine, two grains of asperine, rub the back of my neck with benzine, soak my ankles in kerosene, then a little phenacetine, and a hot whiskey toddy every half hour before meals.
If I found it hard to take the toddy he volunteered to run in every half hour and help me.
Then his wife, Aunt Jessica, blew in with a decoction she called catnip tea. She brought it all the way from the Bronx in a thermos bottle, so I had to drink it or lose a perfectly respectable old aunt.
It tasted like a linoleum c.o.c.ktail--weouw!
During the rest of the day every friend and relative I have in the world rushed in, suggested a sure cure, and then rushed out again.
Peaches tried them all on me and I felt like the inside of a medicine chest.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
To make matters worse I drank some dogberry cordial and it chased the catnip tea all over my concourse.
Then Peaches, being a student of natural history, insisted that I take some h.o.a.rhound, I suppose to bite the dogberry, but it didn"t.
Blood will tell, so the h.o.a.rhound joined forces with the dogberry and chased the catnip up my family tree.