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military efficiency and wearing so many medals
that alongside him John Philip Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely
nude. His friends project him into the political arena and the result is
summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are
made by a rebellious and unreconciled few of us to find a presidential
candidate willing to run on a platform of but four planks, namely:
Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins, Scattering second; Cox
also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo." Manhattan Island,
from whence the rest of the country derives its panics, its jazz tremblors
and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation in the pit of its
financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains at the juncture
of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to start off a
new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld builds a new
Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints. North Dakota
blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned thing
was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that for
some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under

and the sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York
plans are undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along
the lines of the selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing
for some people and much too good for many of the others. The word
"intrigued" creeps into our language and becomes common property,
but the fiction writers saw it first. A business men's cabinet, composed
almost exclusively of politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet
composed almost exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the
payment of Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the
reserves and that chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the
old-line Democrats, practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma
Goldman, are filled with a dismal conviction that creation has gone
plum' to perdition in a hand basket. Those more optimistically inclined
look upon the brighter side of things and distill consolation from the
thought that nothing is so bad but what it might have been
worse--Trotzky might have been born twins. Great Britain has her
post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn Féin enlarges the
British national anthem to read God Save the King Till We Can Get at
Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in the victory
achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that the
airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of
home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to
the early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been
aiming for all through this paragraph.
Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that
something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart
there was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my
imagination 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