head into the blind staggers; then he should be on his own beat
and would know what to do. He made up a bucket of bran-mash, and said
a dipperful of it every two hours, alternated with a drench with
turpentine and axle-grease in it, would either knock my ailments out of
me in twenty-four hours, or so interest me in other ways as to make me
forget they were on the premises. He administered my first dose himself,
then took his leave, saying I was free to eat and drink anything I
pleased and in any quantity I liked. But I was not hungry any more, and
did not care for food.

I took up the Christian Science book and read half of it, then took a
dipperful of drench and read the other half. The resulting experiences
were full of interest and adventure. All through the rumblings and
grindings and quakings and effervescings accompanying the evolution of
the ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I could
note the generous struggle for mastery going on between the mash and the
drench and the literature; and often I could tell which was ahead, and
could easily distinguish the literature from the others when the others
were separate, though not when they were mixed; for when a bran-mash
and an eclectic drench are mixed together they look just like the
Apodictical Principle out on a lark, and no one can tell it from that.
The finish was reached at last, the evolutions were complete, and a
fine success, but I think that this result could have been achieved with
fewer materials. I believe the mash was necessary to the conversion of
the stomach-ache into the botts, but I think one could develop the blind
staggers out of the literature by itself; also, that blind staggers
produced in this way would be of a better quality and more lasting than
any produced by the artificial processes of the horse-doctor.

For of all the strange and frantic and incomprehensible and
uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely
this one is the prize sample. It is written with a limitless confidence
and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often
compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to
have any traceable meaning. There are plenty of people who imagine they
understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in
all cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such
things as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities in the world;
nothin