Strabismus and Justice.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1809, 9 February 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

Strabismus and Justice.

By Bill Nye.

Over in St. Paul I met a man with eyes of cadet bine and a terra cotta nose. His eyes were not only peculiar in shape, but while ona seemed to constantly probe tho future, the other was apparently ransacking the dreamy past. While one rambled among the glorious possibilities of the remote yet golden ultimately, the other sought tho somber depths of the previously. He told me that years ago he had a mild case of strabismus and that both eyes seemed to glare down his nose till he got restless and had them operated on. Those were the days when they used to fasten a crotchet hook under the internal rectus musde and cut it a little with a pair of optical sheep shears. The effect of this course was to allow the eye to drift back to a direct line, but this man fell into tho hands of a drunken surgeon who cut the muscle too much and thereby weakened it so that it gradually swung past the point it ought to have stopped at, and he saw with horror that his eye was going to turn out and protrude as it were so that a man could hang his hat on it. The other followed suit and the two orbs that had for years looked along the bridge of the terra cotta nose, gradually separated, and while one looked toward next Christmas with fond anticipations, the other loved to linger over the remembrances of last fall. This thing continued till he had to peer into the future with his off eye closed and vice versa. It is needless to say that he hungered for the blood oi that physician and surgeon. He tried to lay violent hands on him and wipe up the ground with him and wear him out across a telegraph pole. But the authorities ..always prevented the administration of Bvrift and awful justice. Time passed on till one night the abnormally wall-eyed man loosened a board in the side-walk up town so that the physician and surgeon' caught his foot in it and caused an oblique fracture of the soapula,' pied his dura mater, basted his cornucopia-and wrecked his sarahbellum. Perhaps I r am in error as to some of these medical tefms and- their' orthography, bat v --' i ■ -. ■>

that is about the way tliB man with the divergent orbs toH it to me. The physician and surgeon wa3 quite a ruin. He had to wear clapboards an himself for months, and there were other doctors and laudable pus and threatened gangrene and doctors' bills with the cemetery looming up in the near future. Dxy after day ha took his own- anti-febrile drink* and rammed hte busted system full of iron and strychnine an 3 beef t?a and dover's powders and hypodermi squirt till he wished he could die, but death would not oome. He pawed the air and howled. They fed him his own nuxvomica, tincture c' rhubarb and phosphates and grnel, and brought him back to life with a crooked collar bone, a shattered shoulder blade, and a look of woe. Then he sued the town for $50,000 damages because the sidewalk wtw imperfect, and the wild-eyed man with the inflamed nose got on the jury.' I will not explain how it was done, but there was* a verdict for defendant with co3ts on the Bsculapian wreck. The man with the crooked vision is not handsome, but he is very happy. He says the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they pulverise middling fine.— Detroit Free Press.