ONLY FOUR TO MAM THE PUMPS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XI, 31 August 1895, Page 278

ONLY FOUR TO MAM THE PUMPS.

Dear, dear ! When you eome to tbink of it how eloeeiy related things are ; how one thing brings up another. Ideas are like a lot of beads on a string, aren’t they ? A letter I have just been reading makes me remember what happened to me one winter about twenty years ago. The story is too long to tell here, so I’ll merely give you the tale end of it. I was supercargo on a bark bound from London to Rio. A tremendous gale lasting five days, wrecked us. Forty eight hours after it ceased there were four men and no more left on the vessel. The captain had been killed by a falling spar, three of the crew washed overboard, and the rest of the ship's company (save us four) went sway in tbe long boat with the first and second mates. We were taking in water through a leak at the rate of six inches an hour. Working with all our might the four of us could pump that out in forty minutes, but we muss do it every hour. It was awful work. For two days we kept it up, without sleep. Then we stopped, took to the quarter boat and shoved cff. The sea was quiet—no wind. While we lay to within a mile cf her the ship threw up her nc-se and went down stern first. We were picked up next cay by a Danish brig. Now the odd thing is that the letter which reminded me of that experience has nothing whatever to say about ships. Please te’p use to find cut the association. The lady who writes the letter says that in July, 1681, she got a bad fright. Exactly what it was she doesn’t tell. I wish she did. Anyway it so upset her that she didn't get over the effects cf it for nine years. After that her appetite fell cff: she lost all real relish for food, and what she did eat only made trouble instead of nourishing her. It gave her pain in the pit of her stomach and v curiously enough between the shoulders. She says her eyes and skin presently turned yellow as a buttercup. Her face and abdomen swelled, and her feet the same, the latter so much so that she was obliged to have her shoes made larger. • I got little sleep at night,’ she says, * and was in so much pain I had to be propped up with pillows. For weeks together I could not lie down in bed. I had a dry, hollow cough, and bad night sweats. Then diarr faces set in, and my bowels became ulcerated. I was often in dreadful agony for forty-eight hours at a rime. Then I would have a ehill as though a bucket of cold water were poured down my back. I got so low I could no longer sew, knit, or do any housework or look after my children. My sister had to come and help in the house. ‘ Everybody said I was in a decline and must die. What I suffered for eight years tongue cannot telL The doctor could do nothing for me. He said my complaint was complicated and bad to deal with. In 1886 I went as an outdoor patient to the Shrewsbury Infirmary, bus only got transient relief.’ E The writer is in good health now, bnt why did her case remind me cf the shipwreck ? Let’s settle that first. The association is easy and natural. Just see. The ship sank because we four men hadn't the strength to pump out the water as fast as it came in. Twenty men might have got her into port. It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back ; the last unsupplied need that makes poverty abject and desperate. Toese bodies of ours carry the seeds of disease with them all the time—chiefly the poisons created by imperfect digestion, made worse by careless habits. But as leng as nothing extraordinary happens we manage to scrape along in a halfand half sort of fashion. Yet we’ve got in our blood the stuff that any of a dozen diseases is made of, only waiting for something to set it afire. While the liver, kidneys, lungs, and skin keep us fairly free—that is, don’t let the load get too heavy—we say, ‘ Oh, yes. I’m tolerably well, thank you.’ Little pains and unpleasant symptoms bother ns now and then, but we don’t fancy they mean anything. By and bye something happens. A cold, too hearty a meal, a night of dissipation, an affliction through death or Ices of property, a fright, as in Mrs Bonce's ease, ete. Over we go. The last straw has crushed ns. One loose spark has blown up tke barrel of powder. The erew is too small to save the ship. The kidneys, liver, skin, and stomach strike work, and we must have help right away or perish. All of which means the explosion cf latent indigestion and dyspepsia poisons in the blood. There ! isn’t it plain why I thought of the ship? Now for the conclusion of the lady’s story. She says : *ln 1889 I first heard cf Mother Seigel s Curative Syrup. Half a bottle made me feel better, and by keeping on taking it I wx- soon strong and well as ever. (Signed) Mrs Ann Bunce, the Park, Worthen, near Shrewsbury, February 22x1, 1893 ’ If there were only a way to save sinking ships as certain and trustworthy as Mother Seigei s medicine is in the case of sinking human bcdiea what a blessing it would be to poor sailors.