drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It
would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush
herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes
notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.

Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent
parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff,
asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N.
Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving
in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies.
Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day.

Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or
drugstore.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's
journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot.

But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say
Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such
extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their
ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the
classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of
self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a
superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the
intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by
the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like
gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it
not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to
the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to
sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second
century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere
nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin
filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted
from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L.
Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet.
I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their
essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts
in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)

I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities
between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of
literary parody) t