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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