Boiling Points.

Free Lance, Volume XIX, Issue 992, 9 July 1919, Page 7

Boiling Points.

(For the New Zealand Free Lanee.)

ONCE upon a time a Wellington man had a -crop of boils on the •back of liis neck. He never had this •sort of thing happen to him before, and was naturally somewhat con'cerned about it. ...When the first arrived, he thought it was a pimple, till a friend, chancing to glance at his neck, said it was a young boil, .and that the sooner he did something for it the better. This worried him. He' met another man he knew and ■asked him about it. The man looked at the sore spot, and laughed. ' "Bunkum," he ISaid, "that's not a boil at all—it's a su-per-pimple. Don't worry." But the thing grew bigger and© bigger, and more painful, and at lasi. with a kink in his neck, he resolved to take steps. "What do you think I ought to do about it?" lie asked of one of his friends. "Leave it alone," said the other, "that's my advice. If you start monkeying with it you'll encourage a fresh crop." As. is the way with human nature, lie made further inquiries. "Come into my roomj," said the next boil-savant, "and I'll fix it in one act. You won't know you've had .a boil when you wake up in the mornThe boii-expert got an empty bottle, heated it, sat the patient with bared neck on a chair, and told him to be a man and stick it out till the job was finished. Then he took the bottle and pressed the mouth of it over the boil —hard, no half larks. "Ee—ow!" veiled the patient. "Steady, old man," said the operator, "here sh& comes." Five more minutes of acute Gehenna followed, at the end of which time the boil fiend, to an accompaniment of weird curses from the patient, withdrew the; bottle—an agonising prfocess—gripped the core of the boil and plucked it out. Keep it clean and you'll be all right in no time," he said. The patient staggered home. A week later another boil appeared. He sought advice in less drastic circles. "Drink stout," said one. "Go up to the brewery and get a bottle of brewer's yeast," said another. "That'll shift all the boils in the country." ' ' Then he got a doctor's book and read up all about boils. When he was through with the research work ne didn't know whether he was'a depraved rake who wai paying the price of his past depravities, or merely an athlete who had been training too fine. He either had riot been getting enough, to eat or too much. Finally, he decided to try a bit of all sorts. "One of these cures is bound to get home," he said to himself. He began with stout. He drank a whole bottle, and then waited for results. "That's no good," said the man who had advised the stout. "You want to drink bottles and bottles of it —gallons. So he went on with the stout and «nded up with a spliting headache, a bilious attack, and was violently "You should have taken my tip ar' 1 tried my cure," said the advocate of brewer's yeast. "One spoonful is as good as a barrel of stout. You try it." So he- went along to the brewery, but the Health Department had closed down tne pubs and the breweries on account of the 'flu. Then he went to the chemist's ai^ l got a box of pills. By and by, after a spell of stout, brewer's yeast, pills, prayer and ing, the boils went away, but what

exactly pushed them off his neck he doesn't quite know to this day. His experience yielded lots of lore about boi'j,s. One ' man he met had had seventy boils from start to finish and nearly gave_ up the ghost. Another hadi a huge boil on one of his his ribs. One day when he was rounding up some sheep in the shearing shed a big wether kicked him fair on the boil. He went outside and shed tears of agony, but the boil went away. From another source he learned that boiis sometimes came in epidemics. He mentioned this to one of his "Wellington friends. "Shouldn't be surprised," he said, "there's a lot of them about .-just now and they're pretty infectious. During his martyrdom he read all about Job and his boils. ; Job. you remember, had so l many boils hit him in one act that it was hard to teil which was Job and which was boil. Anyway Job was reckoned to be the most patient man in the history of the Bible, for on top of his boils other things happened to him t would have driven most men to drink. But not Job—he stuck it out, boils and all. Well, it he stuck outf the boil part of the programme without saying "blast them boils," he certainly earned the patience medal, for there's not many men would be satisfied to let it go with a simple remark like that. ■_-~ The man we have been talking about —not Job, the other martyrhas said things on the subject of boils which would fill the "Free Lajice'' and that without repeating himself once.