Baltimore Evening Sun (3 September 1913): 6.

Postcard inquiry from an anonymous correspondent:

Don’t you know that [the Hon.] Isaac Lobe Straus wrote that Sanford advertisement himself?

No; I didn’t know it. But if you ask me if I suspected it, candor compels the admission that some such notion did seize me. However, there is no need to fasten upon dear Isaac any responsibility he seeks to dodge. Before the campaign is over he will appear in propria persona, describing his own genius without false modesty and tearing the hide off the rascally old Sunpaper. Saving only the Hon. Dashing Harry, there is no more ardent and gifted solaricide. When he tackles the Sunpaper, The Sun Building rocks like a ship in a gale and the whole staff is scared stiff. Such are the effects of virtuous indignation, of a pure heart’s sudden bursting, of mind upon matter.

A DAILY THOUGHT. The business of the doctor is to make life longer and death softer.--Dr. Landouzy.

Have I ever given you a wrong steer? No? Then trust me when I recommend the Maryland Suffrage News. A dollar a year, payable in cash, surgical instruments, or ginger pop. All the latest gossip of vice crusading. A family paper for old and young. Send in your dollar at once.–Adv.

The learned Archdeacon Wegg, of Belair, defending the Hon. William J. Bryan against my charge of hollow platitudinizing:

Mr. Bryan * * * did not define reform as change. What he did say was that reform * * * may be defined as change for the better.

Well, what of it? The test of a platitude is its antithesis. If that antithesis is inconceivable, then the platitude is of pure metal. Try this test on the one quoted: Reform may be defined as a change for the worse. Q. E. D.

Just what this archdeacon is driving at in his defense of the eloquent Secretary I can’t quite make out. First he argues that Mr. Bryan emits no platitudes, and then he argues that platitudes are indispensable to orators. For the rest, the rev. gent defies me to destroy “the real institutions of society.” Let him hold his challenges. I am in favor of all the real institutions of society. What I am against is the bogus institutions. For instance, government by man-haters, i. e., suffragettism, Hookerism, Weggery.

During this time I have consumed 20 pounds or more of each of the following drugs: morphine sulphate, sulphuretted ether, ethyl alcohol, quinine hydrobromate, hydrogen peroxide, phenol acetate, chloral, hasheech, nicotine, caffeine, theine, lurium, sweet spirits of nitre, camomile carbonate, chloroform, nitrous oxide, aspirin, mercuric chloride, nux vomica, potassic phosphate and fluoric acid. In addition I have been rubbed and anointed with goose grease, cocoa butter, corundum, hot steam, graphite and cold cream. I have had 18,456 prescriptions filled in the drug stores of 18 nations. I have been treated by 172 different osteopaths, mechano-therapists and chiropractors. I have attempted suicide 14 times, failing each time on account of my acquired immunity to assault and poison. I have taken 34 different vaccines and antitoxins in the arm.

Hay fever, that worst invention of the devil, has cost me the sum of $147,565 during the last 42 years, or an average of $3,513.44 a year. In more than one of those years it has so corrupted my diligence that I have been unable to earn the $3,513.44 by honest toil, and so I have had to got it by chicanery--once, for example, by posing as a reformed opium fiend before bucolic Chautauquas; once by selling mine stock; once by practicing as a Christian Science healer. I have visited all the countries of Christendom in search of a cure: I have been boiled at Hot Springs, drowned at Carlsbad, hofbräued at Munich, electrocuted at Battle Creek, soaked at Aix, hommed at Homburg, viched at Vichy. My whole epidermis has been removed seven times, and by inches. I have spent four months wrapped in blankets, a year in steam baths, two years barefooted. I have consulted 753 physicians and chirurgeons, including 316 quacks.

And all in vain! All to no purpose! When the present hay fever season started, 10 days ago, I was one of the first of all. I went down and out, in fact, like a shot, and had to be hauled to a doctor’s office in a public hack. The doctor was honest–magnificently honest. Said he: “I won’t deceive you. There is no cure for it. Try to forget it. Go home and practice the Beethoven sonatas--the way you play them now could be improved. Read the New Encyclopedia Britannica. Write poetry. Go fishing. Do anything that requires no thought. By November 1 it will be all over. But nothing you or I can do will finish it before then!”

In despair I went home, retired to my couch and turned on the gas. It worked slowly; I remained awake. Oppressed by the tedium of waiting, I reached out for something to read. My hand encountered the Municipal Journal and I began reading an editorial article by the Hon. Aristides Sophocles Goldsborough. I drowsed along, scarcely paying any attention to the learned writer, when suddenly an idea seized me. A cure for hay fever! A “home remedy,” simple, harmless, cheap! I jumped up, turned off the gas, opened the window, sneezed 50 or 60 times and rushed down stairs. In 10 minutes I had tried my sure cure. In 20 minutes I was cured.

That was a week ago. Since then I have sneezed but twice–and both times deliberately, experimentally, just to see if I could do it. My head is clear. I have no more cough. I have no headache. My eyes shine like the glassware behind a bar, and are so strong that I read last night until 1.30 o’clock. I eat three meals a day, do my work with ease, and sleep the profound, untroubled sleep of a condemned murderer. In two hours this morning. I wrote a sonnet, replied to 28 letters from prohibitionists, set half a column of type, killed 900 roaches in my office, had my hair cut, and smoked two 10-cent cigars, the gift of An Old Subscriber. Barring rheumatism, malaria and a touch of arterio-sclerosis, I am completely well.

But what is my cure? Be patient, beloved! Let me hear you at your sneezing for one more day! Let me gaze into your bleary, febrile orbs! You are to be cured at last: don’t shove! By next Sunday you will be laughing at the goldenrod and kicking the ragweed out of your way. Be of good cheer! I’ll tell you how to do it tomorrow!