is hat, and said she should think it had. "Where did you get
into it?" said she. "Get into it?" said the man, "I have not got into
anything, but some deadly disease has got hold of me, and I shall not
live." She told him if any disease that smelled like that had got hold
of him and was going to be chronic, she felt as though he would be a
burden to himself if he lived very long. She got his clothes off, soaked
his feet in mustard water, and he slept. The man slept and dreamed that
a smallpox flag was hung in front of his house and that he was riding in
a butcher wagon to the pest house.
The wife sent for a doctor, and when the man of pills arrived she told
him all about the case. The doctor picked up the patient's new hat,
tried it on and got a sniff. He said the hat was picked before it was
ripe. The doctor and the wife held a postmortem examination of the hat,
and found the slice of Limberger. "Few and short were the prayers
they said." They woke the patient, and, to prepare his mind for the
revelation that was about to be made, the doctor asked him if his
worldly affairs were in a satisfactory condition. He gasped and said
they were. The doctor asked him if he had made his will. He said he had
not, but that he wanted a lawyer sent for at once. The doctor asked him
if he felt as though he was prepared to shuffle off. The man said he had
always tried to lead a different life, and had tried to be done by the
same as he would do it himself, but that he might have made a misdeal
some way, and he would like to have a minister sent for to take an
account of stock. Then the doctor brought to the bedside the hat, opened
up the sweat-leather, and showed the dying man what it was that smelled
so, and told him he was as well as any man in the city.
The patient pinched himself to see if he was alive, and jumped out of
bed and called for his revolver, and the doctor couldn't keep up with
him on the way down town. The last we saw of the odoriferous citizen
he was trying to bribe the bar-tender to tell him which one of those
pelicans it was that put that slice of cheese in his hat-lining.
A FEMALE KNIGHT OF PYTHIAS.
A woman of Bay City, Michigan, disguised herself as a man and clerked
in a store for a year, and then applied for membership in the Knights of
Pythias and was initiated. During the work of the third degree her sex
was discovered. It seems that in the third degree they have an India
rubber rat and a celluloid
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