Chapter 2

"It's immense!" I shouted. "It's the real thing, all right! Why this is aces! I suppose it is called 'Moonlight On Lake Champlain?' Did this one come with the camera or did you draw it from memory?"

"The idea of such a thing," my wife snapped; "can't you see that you're holding the picture the wrong way. Turn it around and you will see yourself and Little Peaches!"

I gave the thing another turn. "Gee whiz!" I said, "now I have it! Oh, the limit! You wished to surprise me with a picture of the sunset at Governor's Island. How lovely it is. See, over here in this corner there's a bunch of soldiers listening to what's cooking for supper, and over here is the smoke from the gun that sets the sun--I like it!"

Then my wife grabbed the picture out of my hands and burst into speech.

When the exercises were over I inquired casually, "Where, my dear, where are the other 21,219 pictures you snapped to-day?"

"Only these two came out good because, don't you see, I'm an amateur yet," was her come back.

Then she looked lovingly at the result of her days work and began to peel some bicarbonate of magnesia off her knuckles with the nut cracker.

"Only two out of 21,219--I think you ought to call it a long shot instead of a snap shot," I whispered, after I had dodged behind a tree on the lawn.

She went in the house without saying a word and I took out my pocketbook and looked at it wistfully.

JOHN HENRY ON THE GRIP

Say, did you ever spar a few hot rounds with a real attack of grip?

When it comes right down to a case of being a Bad Boy the grip has every other disease slapped to a sit-down.

I had the grip some weeks ago and ever since my system has felt like eight cents worth of cheese.

The medicine sharps tell us that the grip is caused by a little germ which emigrated to this country originally from Russia.

If that's the case I'm glad the Japs put the boots to the Czar. I wish they would go after him again and kick his crown off.

I'll bet even money that the father of the first grip germ must have been a bombshell and his mother was some relation to one of Kuropatkin's retreats.

It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the busiest idea that was ever chased by a doctor.

Nobody knows just how or when the grip germs break into the system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis nothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.

The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.

From one small germ there will arise and go forth a family the size of which was never dreamed of in the philosophy of our wise and busy President.

I don't know just exactly how they happened to warm wise to me, but a newly married couple of grip germs took a notion to build a nest somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus, and two hours later they had about 233 children attending the public school in my medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out for recess I would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my top-knot.

Before the next morning came all these grip children had graduated from school and after tearing down the school-house the whole bunch had married and had large families of their own, and all hands were out paddling their canoes on my alimentary canal.

By nine o'clock that morning there must have been eighty-five million grip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to shoot their initials over the walls of my interior department.

It was fierce!

When the doctor arrived on the scene I was carrying enough concealed weapons to exterminate the entire Japanese army.

I'm up to one thing and that is that the Russians couldn't beat the Japs because all the national energy and vitality emigrated from St. Petersburg and came over here with the first grip germs.

If the Czar of all the Russians had been a wise Little Father he would have encouraged the grip germs to remain loyal to their native land and then he could have sent them out to Manchuria to bite the ramparts out of General Oyama instead of chasing inoffensive American citizens into the drug stores.

"Well, anyway the medicine mixer blew in, threw his saws behind the sofa, put his dip net on the mantlepiece, and took a fall out of my pulse.

"Ah!" he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like a currycomb.

"The same to you, Doc," I said.

"Ah!" he said, looking hard at the wall.

"Say, Doc!" I whispered; "there's no use to cut off my leg because the germs will hide in my elbow."

"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?"

"It do!"

"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?"

"Keno!"

"Does your nerve centre tinkle-tinkle like a breakfast bell?"

"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 lie 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, Doctor!" I groaned; "what is it, bubonic plague?"

"You have something worse--you have the grip," he 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 summer.

Later my wife came in and asked me how I felt, and when I began to discourse amiably about undertakers she put up a howl that brought the rest of the family around the bedside on a hurry call.

When I told them I had the grip each and every member of the household from Uncle Peter down to the cook began to suggest remedies, and if I had taken half they suggested they could have sold me to a junk dealer and got good money.

That evening our next door neighbor, Bud Taylor, came in and advised me to take quinine and whiskey every time I felt a shooting pain.

I took his advice, but at the end of the first hour the score was 98 to 37 in favor of the shooting pains, and the whiskey had such an effect on the quinine that it made the germs jealous, so between them they cooked up a little black man who advised me to chase Bud out of the house, which I did by throwing medicine bottles at him.

That night the whiskey and quinine held a director's meeting with the germs and then they wound up with a sort of Mardi Gras parade through my system.

I was the goat!

When daylight broke I was a total wreck, and I swore that the next person that said whiskey and quinine to me would get all his.

After breakfast another friend of ours, Jack Gibson, blew in, and after he looked me over his weary eye fell on the decanter.

Then Jack smacked his lips and whispered that the best cure for the grip was a glass of whiskey and quinine every time I felt chills and fever, and he'd be glad to join me.

When loving hands picked Jack up at the bottom of the stairs he was almost insulted, but he quieted down when my wife explained to him that I was suffering not only from the grip but that I had also a slight attack of jiu jitsu.

After weeks of study devoted to the subject I have come to the conclusion that the only way to cure the grip is to stay sick until you get better.

That's what I did!

JOHN HENRY ON COURTING

Are you wise to the fact that everything is changing in this old world of ours, and that since the advent of fuss-wagons even the old-fashioned idea of courtship has been chased to the woods?

It used to be that on a Saturday evening the young gent would draw down his six dollars worth of salary and chase himself to the barber shop, where the Dago lawn trimmer would put a crimp in his moustache and plaster his forehead with three cents worth of hair and a dollar's worth of axle-grease.

Then the young gent would go out and spread 40 cents around among the tradesmen for a mess of water-lilies and a bag of peanut brittle.

The lilies of the valley were to put on the dining-room table so mother would be pleased, and with the peanut brittle he intended to fill in the weary moments when he and his little geisha girl were not making googoo eyes at each other.

But nowadays it is different, and Dan Cupid spends most of his time on the hot foot between the coroner's office and the divorce court.

I've got a hunch that young people these days are more emotional and like to see their pictures in the newspapers.

Nowadays when a clever young man goes to visit his sweetheart he hikes over the streets in a benzine buggy, and when he pulls the bell-rope at the front door he has a rapid fire revolver in one pocket and a bottle of carbolic acid in the other.

His intentions are honorable and he wishes to prove them so by shooting his lady love if she renigs when he makes a play for her hand.

I think the old style was the best, because when young people quarreled they didn't need an ambulance and a hospital surgeon to help them make up.

In the old days Oscar Dobson would draw the stove brush cheerfully across his dog-skin shoes and rush with eager feet to see Lena Jones, the girl he wished to make the wife of his bosom.

"Darling!" Oscar would say, "I am sure to the bad for love of you. Pipe the downcast droop in this eye of mine and notice the way my heart is bubbling over like a bottle of sarsaparilla on a hot day! Be mine, Lena! be mine!"

Then Lena would giggle. Not once, but seven giggles, something like those used in a spasm.

Then she would reply, "No, Oscar; it cannot be. Fate wills it otherwise."

Then Oscar would bite his finger nails, pick his hat up out of the coal-scuttle and say to Lena, "False one! You love Conrad, the floorwalker in the butcher shop. Curses on Conrad, and see what you have missed, Lena. I have tickets for a swell chowder party next Tuesday. Ah! farewell forever!"

Then Oscar would walk out and hunt up one of those places that Carrie Nation missed in the shuffle and there, with one arm glued tight around the bar rail, he would fasten his system to a jag which would last for a week.

Despair would grab him and he'd be Oscar with the souse thing for sure.

When he would recover strength enough to walk down town without attracting the attention of the other side of the street, he would call on Lena and say, "Lena, forgive me for what I done, but love is blind--and, besides, I mixed my drinks. Lena, I was on the downward path and I nearly went to hell."

Then Lena would say, "Why, Oscar, I saw you and your bundle when you fell in the well, but I didn't know it was as deep as you mention."

Then they would kiss and make up, and the wedding bells would ring just as soon as Oscar's salary grew large enough to tease a pocketbook.

But these days the idea is altogether different.

Children are hardly out of the cradle before they are arrested for butting into the speed limit with a smoke wagon.

Even when they go courting they have to play to the gallery.

Nowadays Gonsalvo H. Puffenlotz walks into the parlor to see Miss Imogene Cordelia Hoffbrew.

"Wie gehts, Imogene!" says Gonsalvo.

"Simlich!" says Imogene, standing at right angles near the piano because she thinks she is a Gibson girl.

"Imogene, dearest," Gonsalvo continues; "I called on your papa in Wall Street yesterday to find out how much money you have, but he refused to name the sum, therefore you have untold wealth!"

Gonsalvo pauses to let the Parisian clock on the mantle tick, tick, tick!

He is making the bluff of his life you see, and he has to do even that on tick.

Besides, this furnishes the local color.

Then Gonsalvo bursts forth again, "Imogene! Oh! Imogene! Will you be mine and I will be thine without money and without the price."

Gonsalvo pauses to let this idea get noised about a little.

Then he goes on, "Be mine, Imogene! You will be minus the money while I will have the price!"

Gonsalvo trembles with the passion which is consuming his pocketbook, and then Imogene turns languidly from a right angle triangle into more of a straight front, and hands Gonsalvo a bitter look of scorn.

Then Gonsalvo grabs his revolver and, aiming it at her marble brow, exclaims, "Marry me this minute or I will shoot you in the top-knot, because I love you."

Then papa rushes into the room and Gonsalvo politely requests the old gentleman to hold two or three bullets for him for a few moments.

Gonsalvo then bites deeply into a bottle of carbolic acid and just as the Coroner climbs into the house the pictures of the modern lover and loveress appear in the newspapers, and fashionable Society receives a jolt.

This is the new and up-to-date way of making love.

However, I think the old style of courting is the best, because you can generally stop a jag before it gets to the undertaker.

What do you think?

JOHN HENRY ON SUMMER RESORTS

Me for that summer resort gag--Oh! fine!

I fell for a Saratoga set-back this summer but never no more for mine.

At night I used to sit up with the rest of the social push and drink highballs to make me sick, so I could drink Saratoga water in the morning to make me well.

That's what is called reciprocity, because it works both ways against the middle.

Isn't it the limit the way people from all over the country will rush to these fashionable summer resorts with wide open pocketbooks and with their bank accounts frothing at the mouth!

The most popular fad at every summer resort I've ever climbed into is to watch the landlord reaching out for the coin.

Husbands make bets with their wives whether the landlord of the hotel will get all their money in an hour or an hour and a half.

Both husband and wife loose; because the landlord generally gets it in ten minutes.

At some of the hotel diningrooms it costs six dollars to peep in, eight dollars to walk in, and fifteen dollars to get near enough to a waiter to talk soup.

You can see lots of swell guys in the dining-rooms who are now using a fork in public for the first time.

This reminds me of an experience I had in a certain summer resort dining-room not long ago.

At a table near me sat Ike Gooseheimer.

Ike is a self-made man and he made a quick job of it.

Ike was eating with his knife and doing it so recklessly that I felt like yelling for the sticking plaster.

After I had watched him for about five minutes trying to juggle the new peas on a knife, it got on my nerves, so I spoke to him.

"Ike," I said, thinking possibly I might cure him with a bit of sarcasm, "aren't you afraid you will cut yourself with the sword?"

"Oh! no, no," Ike answered, looking at the knife with contempt; "there is no danger at all. But at the Palmer House in Chicago--Ah! there they have sharp knives!"

Ike is beyond the breakers for mine.

The races at Saratoga were extremely exciting.

A friend of mine volunteered to pick out the winners for me, but after I lost eight dollars I decided that it would be cheaper to pick out a new friend.

But I do love to mingle with Society at the summer resorts.

It isn't generally known, but one of my great-grandfathers was present when the original 400 landed at Plymouth Rock.

My great-grandfather owned the Rock.

A couple of nights after the original 400 landed on Plymouth Rock the leader of the smart set, Mrs. Von Tweedledum, gave a full dress ball.

My great-grandfather looked in at the full dress ball and was so shocked that he went and opened a clothing store next day.

Society never forgave him for this insinuation.

But, say, isn't it immense the way the doings of these Society dubs are chronicled in the Society papers?

In case you haven't noticed them I would like to put you wise to a few:

Social Glints From the Summer Resorts

Among the Smart Setters now present at Saratoga is John J. Sousebuilder, the well-known millionaire from Cincinnati. He is here to follow the races but he seems to have an idea that the horses live in the hotel bar-room, because that is where he does most of his following.

Cornelius Sudslifter, the well-known inventor of the patent chowless chow chow, is paying deep attention to Esmeralda Ganderface, the brilliant daughter of old man Tightfist Ganderface, the millionaire inventor of a system of opening clams by steam. Cornelius and Esmeralda make a sweet and beautiful picture as they stroll arm in arm to the post-office, where Cornelius mails a check for the week's alimony to his former wife, who is visiting lawyers in South Dakota.

Hector J. Roobernik, well known in Society, is spending the summer at Atlantic City. Hector was formerly a Bohemian glass blower, but he is now rich enough to leave off the last part of his occupation, so he calls himself just a Bohemian--which is different. Hector is paying deep attention to Phyllis Kurdsheimer, the daughter of Mike Kurdsheimer, the millionaire inventor of the slippery elm shoe horn.

Gus Beanhoister, the widely known bunion broker and Society man of South Newark, is summering at Cape May, where he mingles with the other pets of fashion. Gus finds it very hard to refrain from looking at people's feet during the bathing hours, but otherwise he is doing quite well.

Hank Schmitpickle and his latest wife from Chicago sailed on the steamship _Minnehaha_ last week to spend the season in the British capital. The Schmitpickles will occupy the villa at No. 714 Cottagecheese Place, Blitheringham Park, near Speakeasy Towers, on the Old Kent Road, Bayswater, across from Shoreditch--God save the King!

Mercedes Cauliflower is summering at Narragansett Pier, and her _fiance_, Mr. Peter Cuckoobird, is dancing attendance upon her. It will be remembered that Mercedes is the daughter and heiress of Jacob Cauliflower, the millionaire manufacturer of boneless tripe, which has become quite a fad in Society since the Beef Trust got chesty. Peter Cuckoobird is a rising young brick-layer on his father's side, but on account of the fortune left him by his mother, he is now butterflying through life in a gasolene barouche with diamond settings in the tires.

Hank Dobbs and his daughter, Crystaline, sailed on the Oceanic yesterday for the Riviera. Before the steamship pulled out Hank admitted that he didn't know whether the Riviera was a city or a new kind of cheese, but if money could do the trick he intended to know the truth.

Mr. and Mrs. James Shine von Shine were divorced yesterday at the home of the bride's parents in Newport. The ceremony was very simple but expensive to the ex-husband. Considerable alimony changed hands.

The private cottage of Mrs. Offulrich Swellswell at Bar Harbor has been beautifully decorated in honor of the approaching divorce of their daughter, Gladys, from her husband, Percy Skiddoo. Percy is the well-known manufacturer of the reversible two-step so much used by Society.

Cards are all out for a divorce in the family of the Von Guzzles, but owing to a typographical error in the cards it is impossible to say whether it is the old man or the son. Both employ blonde typewriters.

JOHN HENEY ON GREAT MEN

Uncle Peter is one of the gamest little chunks of humanity that ever looked the world in the eye, but when he heard the edict put forth by Doctor Osler the old man went overboard with a splash.

He was under water a long time.

He thought the Bogey Man had him for sure.

Uncle Peter felt that it would no longer be possible for him to pass a drug store without some young fellow rushing out with a handkerchief full of chloroform and yelling, "Here, you old chestnut! here's where you get it in the nose!"

In the dark watches of the night Uncle Peter used to wake up covered with cold perspiration, because he had dreamed that Doc Osler was pounding him on the bald spot with a baseball bat after having poured hair dye all over his breakfast food.

At last Uncle Peter got so nervous I advised him to write to the Doctor.

"Ask him if he won't commute your sentence because you live in the country and are a commuter," I suggested.

The doctor replied to Uncle Peter at once and I will try to translate his letter from Johns Hopkins into pure English, as near as I can remember:

JOHNS HOPKINS, To-day.

Dear Uncle Peter:--When I cut loose with the observation that men were all in at 40 and _rauss mittim_ at 60 I kept several exceptions up my sleeve.

The exceptions include you, Uncle Peter, and myself also.

It could not apply in your case, Uncle Peter, because I have known you since we lived together in Baltimore many moons ago, and I realize that the years have only improved you, Uncle Peter, and that to-day you are a bigger shine than you ever were.

One point about my observation which seems to have escaped the eyes of the general public, but which you suggest so delicately in your letter, Uncle Peter, will be found in the beautiful words of the poet who says:

Some advertisement now and then Is needed by the greatest men!

Don't mention it, Uncle Peter, for what I tell you is confidential, but do you know that my little bunch of remarks, which cost me nothing anyway because I was invited to the banquet, have given me more widespread advertisement than Andy Carnegie can get for eighteen public libraries?

You know, Uncle Peter, there is nothing in the world so easy to make stand up on its hind legs as the general public if you just go after it right.

But the trick is, Uncle Peter, to know what to say and when to say it.

Look at my case and then tell me if it wasn't up to me to emit a rave.

There I was, just about to leave my native land to go to Oxford and become the squeegee professor in the Knowledge Factory and be all swallowed up in the London fog, but nobody seemed to miss me before I went away.

I began to feel lost, lonely and forgotten like a vice-president of the United States.

Then came the banquet, Uncle Peter, and like a flash the inspiration came to me and I arose in my seat and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, after a man reaches the age of 40 he is a seldom-happener, and after he gets to the age of 60 he is a dead rabbit and it's the woods for his."

What was the result, Uncle Peter?

Every man in the world felt that I was his personal insult.

Every man _over_ 40 listened to what I said and began to yell for the police; and every man _under_ 40 realized that he would be _over_ 40 some day, so he began to look for a rock to throw at me.

I had them, going and coming.