erudition. Ziegfeld builds a new Follies show
around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints. North
Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers
that darned thing was loaded in both barrels.
The Prussians are pained to note that for some reason
or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches
are plowed under and the sites sown with rosemary;
that’s for remembrance. In New York plans
are undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment
along the lines of the selective draft, upon the theory
that booze is a bad thing for some people and much
too good for many of the others. The word “intrigued”
creeps into our language and becomes common property,
but the fiction writers saw it first. A business
men’s cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
politicians, succeeds a business men’s cabinet
composed almost exclusively of politicians. In
order to hurry along the payment of Installment One
of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and
that chore is chored. Pessimists, including many
of the old-line Democrats, practically all the maltsters,
and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a dismal conviction
that creation has gone plum’ to perdition in
a hand basket. Those more optimistically inclined
look upon the brighter side of things and distill
consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad
but what it might have been worse—Trotzky
might have been born twins. Great Britain has
her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24.
The Sinn Fein enlarges the British national anthem
to read God Save the King Till We Can Get at Him!
By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in
the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly
Republican, but that the airship program went heavily
Democratic. Popular distrust of home-brew recipes
assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up
to the early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which
is what I have been aiming for all through this paragraph.
Quite without warning, I discovered along about the
first of March that something ailed me; something
was rocking the boat. About my heart there was
a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my
imagination was at fault. Mentally, I found myself—well,
for lack of a better word to express it—logy.
Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk
and peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance
of having reached the age when a great many of us
are confronted by the distressing discovery that we
are rapidly getting no younger.
Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously
perfect health as it has been my good fortune to enjoy
takes note that certain nagging manifestations are
persisting within him it is his duty, or least it
should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying
cause of whatever it is that distresses him and correct
the trouble before it becomes chronic.
I did not get frightened—I trust I am not
a self-alarmist—but I did get worried.
I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who
approach middle age so often do, for the medical examiner
of an insurance company to scare me into sudden conniption
fits. But I also made up my mind that I would
find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything,
and endeavor to master it while the mastering was
good.