ess and will walk right up to you and kick you on the shins, big as
you are.

Nobody ever knows just what make-up the grip germs will put on to break
into the human system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis
nothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.

The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.

I discovered shortly after I had sneezed myself into a condition of pale
blue profanity that a newly married couple of grip germs had taken a
notion to build a nest somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus,
and two hours later they had about 233 children attending the public
school in my medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out for
recess I would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my Lima.

Before daylight came all these grip children had graduated from school
and, after tearing down the school-house, the whole bunch had married
and had large families of their own, and all hands were out paddling
their canoes on my alimentary canal.

By nine o'clock that morning there must have been eighty-five million
grip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to shoot their
initials over the walls of my interior department.

It was fierce!

When Doctor Leiser arrived on the scene I was carrying enough concealed
weapons to start something in Mexico.

The good old pill-pusher threw his saws behind the sofa, put his dip-net
on the mantelpiece, and took a fall out of my pulse.

"Ah!" he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like a
currycomb.

"The same to you, Doc," I said.

"Ah!" he said, looking hard at the wall.

"Say, Doc!" I whispered; "there's no use to cut off my leg because the
germs will hide in my elbow."

"Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum, near the apex of the
cosmopolitan?" inquired the doctor.

"Surest thing you know," I said.

"Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distant
laughter in the panatella?" he asked.

"It's a cinch, Doc," I said.

"Do you feel a roaring in the cornucopia with a tickling sensation in
the diaphragm?" he asked.

"Right again," I whispered.

"Do the joints feel sore and pinched like a pool-room?" he said.

"Right!"

"Does your tongue feel rare and high-priced, like a porterhouse steak at
a summer resort?"

"Exactly!"

"Do you feel a spasmodic fluttering in the concertina?"

"Yes!"

"Have you a sort of nervous hesitation in your hunger and does
everything you eat ta