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."