Constant concoctions bringing no relief, I was at last listening to a well meant prescription from my co-laborer Dick. He said his remedy would give unwavering satisfaction to ailments like mine. I don’t think his remedy would stand the pure food law test; but when you get to clutching you’ll clutch anything. So I listened to the unlearned pharmacist and keenly assented and he started to compound two well known ingredients in equal parts. One ingredient was controlled by that magnetic dollar chaser, John D., and the other was controlled by nobody, it did the controling, i. e., oil and whiskey. I’d cover up this last ingredient and give it a better concealed classical standing but ignorance is bliss and there you are. This carefully prepared drink, my friend said, should be taken five minutes before breakfast. So according to directions I hoisted the tin cup and down went the fluids. Just enough oil in it to make it slip quick, and you had it before you really knew it. It is now twenty-three years since I swallowed that conglomeration and I can’t hardly pass a home one-gallon kerosene can full or empty without a keen desire to kick the bottom out of it, but you have to be careful with other people’s property, whether it’s mortgaged or not. No matter how keen or fertile your imagination may be you can’t realize a dose of this character unless you taste it. Take the minutest equal parts of each, mix them, drink them and be convinced. Was I sick? Of all the great guns of all our wars, Civil or uncivil, I will take my oath before any judge of common jurisdiction, sitting as a court of record and say I WAS. The only recollection I have of the breakfast menu was the two hard boiled eggs and a faint remembrance, as I was leaving the table, of a fruit picture on the wall tipping up and down. That was the first time I ever saw anything inanimate acting so. Mercy, the taste of that oil and the remembrance of it, mixing in a place the size of your fist! Think of that rip-roaring, sizzling tobacco flavored, ingredient, trying to slip one over on that kerosene and knock out those two hard-boiled, well matured, boarding-house eggs. I say in all candor, I don’t blame John D. for watering the oil. Water it more, John, it will be milder to take. I went through the oil belt in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and all the rest, I visited all the stills, illicit, and otherwise of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Colorado; and as soon as brother Pat could get me to my room and my head out of the window I hoisted the hottest fluids and food stuffs ever contained in the stomach of man or beast. I have always felt sorry for those eggs on account of their age.