"CIVIS" CONTRACTS THE INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1676, 22 March 1890, Page 4

"CIVIS" CONTRACTS THE INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC.

(" Otago Witness.") La grippe is here. There cannot be a doubt of it,f or 1 have got it myself. I have not only got it, but I know how I got it. The thing was in this wise. Whilst unfolding an English newspaper received by the mail I suddenly began to sneeze. The experience was not altogether new ; I had sneezed before, but not often, I fancy, with the same peremptory emphasis. In short, this sneezing was a sneezing not to be sneezed at. The fit over, and the water wiped from my eyes, what was the first thing that I saw in the newspaper between the sheets of which my face had been buried ? What I saw (mark me here !) was the headline of a leading article in these ominous words —

The Mysterious Grip '. It was an article on the influenza epidemic. Probably the man who wrote it had himself the influenza. It is conceivable that the compositors were " under the influence " when they put it into type, and it is tolerably certain, I am afraid, that the office boy who folded the paper enclosed within it a cough and a sneeze for transmission to the Antipodes. Anyhow, they had contrived amongst them to give me la grippe, for gripped I was, and gripped I remain, a victim to influenza | per the .San Francisco mail ! Fancy the conditions, then, under which this week's Passing Notes are getting themselves written! "A misfit skull, thafris too tight across the forehead and that pinches behind the ears"— limbs that ache and eyes that run, a nose as apt for satiric comment as Bardolph's, all my moral principles gone to "pie," hope extinct, affection dead (save for my pockethandkerchief), cough, cough, sneeze, sneeze, - atch— atch -atchee ! atchew ! —really this is too bad ! What have I done to deserve it ? Dim and dizzy memories of Sir Robert Stout, H. S. Fish, Dr Macgregor of Oamaru, flit through my throbbing brain as I try to ponder the why and wherefore. If repentance were of any avail I would repent,— but la grippe knows no repentance. Nothing ia left to me, therefore, but to harden my heart, tallow my nose, and so to bed— first affixing (with a valedictory sneeze) my sign manual— mm _^__ m^___ m ___ m _ Civis,