Receiving no answer to his thirsty appeal he arose and said, "This is a heluva club--rottenest service in this club--s'limit, that's what it is, s'limit!" Then he hiccoughed his weary way out of the room and I haven't seen him since. An hour later Uncle Louis Miffendale had looked me over and concluded I had galloping asthma, compressed tonsilitis, chillblainous croup, and incipient measles. He insisted that I take three grains of quinine, two grains of asperine, rub the back of my neck with benzine, soak my ankles in kerosene, then a little phenacetine, and a hot whiskey toddy every half hour before meals. If I found it hard to take the toddy he volunteered to run in every half hour and help me. Then his wife, Aunt Jessica, blew in with a decoction she called catnip tea. She brought it all the way from the Bronx in a thermos bottle, so I had to drink it or lose a perfectly respectable old aunt. It tasted like a linoleum cocktail--weouw! During the rest of the day every friend and relative I have in the world rushed in, suggested a sure cure, and then rushed out again. Peaches tried them all on me and I felt like the inside of a medicine chest. [Illustration] To make matters worse I drank some dogberry cordial and it chased the catnip tea all over my concourse. Then Peaches, being a student of natural history, insisted that I take some hoarhound, I suppose to bite the dogberry, but it didn't. Blood will tell, so the hoarhound joined forces with the dogberry and chased the catnip up my family tree. Suffering antiseptics! everybody with a different remedy, from snake poison to soothing syrup--but it cured the grip. Now all I have to do is to cure the medicine. CHAPTER X YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT A MUSICAL EVENING Say! did you ever stray away from home of an evening and go to one of those parlor riots? Friend wife called it a _musicale_, but to me it looked like a session of the Mexican congress in a boiler factory. They pulled it off at Mrs. Luella Frothingham's, over on the Drive. I like Luella and I like her husband, Jack Frothingham, so it's no secret conclave of the Anvil Association when I whisper them wise that the next time they give a musical evening my address is Forest Avenue, corner of Foliage Street, in the woods. The Frothinghams are nice people and old friends and they have more money than some people have hay, but that doesn't give them a license to spoil one of my perfectly good evenings by sprinkling a lot of canned music and fricasseed recitations all over it. The Frothinghams have a skeleton in their closet. Its name is Uncle Heck and he weighs 237--not bad for a skeleton. Uncle Heck is a Joe Morgan. His sole ambition in life is to become politely pickled and fall asleep draped over a gold chair in the drawing room when there's high-class company present. For that reason the Frothinghams on state occasions put the skids under Uncle Heck and run him off stage till after the final curtain.