Letters of Peregrine Pickle

by George P. Upton

I WRITE to you to-day with a sugar-coated pill and a small bottle of suspicious-looking fluid, which Æsculapius has designated with the cabalistic abbreviations "Aq. Cret. Rhu. Pulv. 2 jiii," between myself and the delirious chaos of fever.

My surroundings are not of a character to induce extravagant cheerfulness, or to resolve a very decided precipitate out of the mixture of virtue and necessity—a severely chemico-moral test I have been working at for the past three days.

I think a man might dig into a cucumber for sunbeams or a mushroom for moonlight, with better chances of success, than I shall have in attempting to extract humor from the scanty material at hand, viz: Several wet towels, ice water, a mustard plaster, sundry hot bricks, pills, potions and lotions ad libitum, and a small piece of toasted cracker.

The last item is the connecting link between myself and the good goddess Hygeia, and I regard it with an interest I never knew before, considering the clutch with which Febris has seized me.

Thus, skirting along the shore of Febris, sufficiently near to catch with full force the burning simooms which blow across its miasmatic lands—near enough to burn from its equator and to freeze from its poles, to feel its clamps and hooks, with which it is tugging at bone and muscle, while the soul has gone visiting, and not even left the Will at home to resist disease—near enough all night long, as I sail in the darkness, to see the will-o'-the-wisps, and goblins, and chimeras, the skeletons of dead fancies, the ghosts of dreams and the realities of horror which are the only inhabitants of this land over which Febris reigns—behind me the very bright light of day, and before, only a very uncertain star—under a red-hot bed quilt, flanked with a small drug store—the great world outside only recognizable by a confused hum—isolated from complete sights and sounds—I vegetate and moralize.

If one should feed luxuriously on almond paste and comfits all his life, he would never appreciate the products of sour apple trees and the extracts of much-maligned herbs. So also if one should forever pursue the beaten track of good health, which is only the case in perfection among buffaloes and Digger Indians, one would never know the luxury and the blessing of being sick. We must have, now and then, a cessation of the good to appreciate the bad.

I can conceive that it would be the height of wretchedness to be compelled to live with a saint on earth. This world was not made for saints, and those who have made the foolish attempt to be saints, have wisely climbed pillars, gone into caves or wandered in deserts, getting as far out of the world as possible. Those who have persisted in being saints and remaining in the world, have usually been hanged or burned by other saints.

Equally, the man who is always well, becomes a nuisance after a time. His ruddy face hangs out a constant banner of presumptuous defiance, and the only person who can conscientiously love him is a life insurance agent. He never knows the soft ministrations of small female hands, or the hygienic virtue in the hem of an old lady's robe. Consequently his milk of human kindness is very apt to freeze up. He can have but small sympathy, for no one can sympathize, who has not learned sympathy by experience. At this present moment I fairly burn with pity, and extend a red right hand of sympathy to every man, woman and child, who has ever had a fever, who has a fever now, or who is going to have a fever. In his great, strong animal existence he goes crashing and smashing about like a whale among minnows, with this difference—that the whale is bent upon legitimate prey, while your healthy man is simply trying to show that he is a whale.

As who should say, "Here am I, Mr. Merryman, the great American Healthist. Any lady or gentleman in the audience, wishing to show liver, lights or lungs, will please step forward into the arena."