A MIGHTY PILL SHALLOWER.

West Coast Times, Issue 2586, 14 July 1877, Page 3

A MIGHTY PILL SHALLOWER.

Although the old Suabin master who boasted that, in the course of a long pedagogic career, fee had administered fifty thousand caijings and more than ten thousand proper floggings, might pride himself on the reflection that he had done in his time an immensity of good, yet the recipients of his baculine arguments, might in the first iristiince, have qiic-tioned the benificence of his mode of treatment. Schoolboys? are suph an ungrateful generation ' B"ut what shall we jwy ,of an elderly gentleman who, it was gravely stated the other day i» the .Court of&uetn's Bench, had been in the habit during thirty years of swallowing every .d:;y fiye pills? Thus, according to the calculation of a learned junior engaged in the case, he had taken £p all 54,750 pills! This aggregrate hiust "be founded, of course, on the" average. The gentjemnn mayh.nve abstained from his fejist of boL.ses on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, >yh v er,ea.« b.e may Jjave .taken a .double alloivpiice on .Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, and the Bank Holidays. Nay, perchance on Ihe memorable day when ber Mnjtsfy and the Prince of Wales went to St. Paul's he may have swallowed forty piHe as a kind of pharmaeppic Te Deum. Appetite comes with eaing. As this pblyphagist" r in' pills happens to be the defendant in a very old case of alleged breach of promise of mairjage, which has already been decided pHce, but in which a ne^r tngl has been ordered, we are prevented kom saying any tiling tjee just now on the judicial merits of the lawsuit of "Read versus Oluacres." We regard the elderly gentleman simply from his standpoint as the Best Friend of the Patent Medicine Vendor, and as the Champion Pijl Swallower of tee United Kjngdpijj.' The Lord Chief Justice was' pardonably inquisitive to know what kind of pills they were which Mr Oldacres took, to the number of 54,750 in 30 years— -apd survived; but for once (hat learned counsel to whom the question was addressed was at fault. He did not know. It in well, perhaps, that he was not wellinformed on the point, otherwise there might be an ugly rush on the particular species of bolus patronised by fhe elderly jsentleman, and a thoughtless public, imitating the example of the sjreedy boy who ate up two potsfull of Liebig's Extract of Meat, and drank a quart bottle of cod liver oil, s>t a sitting, in order to make himself strpng, might take tp gulping down pills at the rate of half-a-dozen " family boxe^ " a day. PflJ-taking is apt to become a passion, and to degenerate into a vice, ljjce the eating of opium and the smpkiag o f <-jgar C ttes ; and tbp gastronome in pills who began with a single globule per diem xalgj^t speedily discover that he had stomach enough for the entire cpntept of Apothecaries' Hall,