Daily Globe

The Ailing Man.

BY BOB BURDETTE, IN THE HAWK-EYE.

I had a pleasant companion on my way home from Aurora. He got on at Bristol, and took dinner at the "Cosmopolitan." He sat with me at dinner, and didn't seem to have much appetite. He groaned when he took up the bill of fare and sighed as he looked across the table at my order, and then shook his head dolefully, and told the waiter to bring him a little boiled trout, with egg sauce; a bit of boiled mutton, with caper sauce; some roast beef, a trifle rare; just a taste of roast lamb; turkey, with cranberry sauce; mashed potatoes; roast duck; some pork and beans, Boston style; stewed tomatoes, corn, turnips, squash, peas, a bit of cold tongue, some sharp relishes, and a cup of coffee. Then he ordered some assorted cake, cranberry pie, Indian pudding, and ice-cream for dessert, and said he felt a darned sight more like dying than eating.

If he dies as well as he eats, just imagine, just think, what a glorious, triumphant death that man will die.

Shortly after dinner the poor man came into the coach, and sat down opposite me.

"Ah," he said, with a deep groan, "I don't know what I wouldn't give if I could eat like you."

"Sir!" I said, in a fine burst of indignation, for I feared he was going to accuse me of swallowing my knife every time I took a bite of pie, and I just made up my mind that I would cut his heart out if he hinted at such a thing.

"O, it's a fact," he replied. "I haven't enjoyed a meal for years."

"Was it possible?" I asked in amazement.

"Indeed, yes," he said; "I am all out of fix. I've got no liver at all, to speak of."

I didn't suppose one liver would be of any account to him; I rather thought that if he could get a couple of gangs of livers and work them by reliefs, they might be able to help him along, especially if he had them made of tin. But then he was a stranger to me, so I didn't feel justified in making the suggestion.

No, he continued, "my liver is of no more account than a lump of lead. I suppose," he said, plaintively, "it's as big as four of yours."

And he looked at me with an appealing glance, as though he expected me to take my liver out and let him examine it, as though it were an old gold watch he wanted to trade for.

Now, if there is anything in this wide, beautiful world that will make me mad, it is to have a man who is ailing sit down and bore me with a list of his diseases and a detailed description of his anatomical derangements. And the men of free America, it seems to me, would rather talk about their perishing livers than their never-dying souls, and it always makes me mad for a man to come at me and burden me with complaints about the torpidity of his liver: as though I were his physician. I am proud to confess to the blindest, densest ignorance concerning my own inner life. I don't know whether my liver is round or shaped like a gun-case, and I don't care a continental, although I always had the impression that it was just under the shoulder-blades. So I said to the man, with very great enthusiasm:

"O, do tell me all about your liver! I should so like to know all about it I am so interested in such things."

The man looked a little surprised at my sudden enthusiasm, but he said there wasn't much to tell about it It was as torpid, he said, as a snake in December.

"O, charming, charming!" I exclaimed "And is it tame? Do you let it run around loose, or do you have to keep it chained up?"

The stranger stared, and looked as though he would like to sit a little farther away. He said he didn't just exactly understand me.

"And how is your spleen?" I asked eagerly, "and your ventricles? And do tell me about your thoracic duct, and how do you get along with your tonsils? And have you raised any new bones since I saw you last; and when did you hear from your diaphragm? Do tell me all about your viscera: make a clinic of yourself, and tell me the Christian names of all your bones and the appurtenances thereunto appertaining. Tell me—"

But he got up and slowly backed out of the car, and the conductor shortly afterward told me that the man with a liver told him that the man who escaped from the asylum at Jacksonville last week was in the rear coach.

Philosophers say that closing the eyes makes the sense of hearing more acute A wag suggests that this accounts for the many eyes that close in our churches on Sundays.