" OH, DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T COME NEAR ME!"

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 12, 6 January 1893, Page 31

" OH, DON'T TOUCH ME ! DON'T COME NEAR ME!"

These words were uttered with a howl — almost a yell. Yet the boy to whom i hey were addressed wasn't within ten feet of the howler, and wouldn't have come closer for his life. Toe scene was a big business office in New York, and tbe howler was the chief man in it He owned the concern, and was very rich, and « decent fellow enough. But sometimes he would break out like that, and bowl as though he bad just discovered a fire in a powder mil). You could hear him from the basement of the roof. What was the matter with him f Temporary insanity ? Not quite, but something nearly as bad. He had an acute attack of gout in his toe, and at those solemn crises he couldn't bear the sight of even a shadow moving in his direction. Ask somebody who has tbe gout how it feels. Fancy a blacksmith twisting your toe with hot pinchers while a shoemaker if thrusting « bradawl through your kneejoint. That's a little like it. Well, there are things not so bad as gout, yet they make vi touchy enough. Here comes a man, for instance, who says, " Everything now mat a trouble to me.'* What should he talk that way for f Wtay should everything have been a trouble to him f There is an old saying that while we can't keep the crows from flying, we needn't let them make nests in onr hair. That's good sense. But it's easy to give advice and to quote proverbs. How does a person act who suffers from boils ?

Now, the fountain of all feeling and pain is the nerves. An hour or two of toothache is a lesson on the nervous system. But there are diseases (or one disease anyhow) in which all the nerves in the body seem to tingle to every sight and sound. The mind is on the look-out for evil— the man is depressed and afraid. Every word means mischief, and every bush hides an enemy. So he thinks. He knows what Solomon meant when he said, " The grasshopper is a burden."

Mr Michael McOormack is a railway messenger and lives in Mullingar, County Westmeatb, Ireland. In June, 1890, he was taken ill. His mouth tasted foul and coppery, his stomach was sour and dead, and when be forced down a little food he felt so much distress and pain after it that be was sorry he hadn't let it alone and gone hungry. Besides this there were pains wandering through his chest, back, and sideß, hurting him, biting here and there like ugly dogs loose in a town. Bis head swam with dizziness and he couldn't g> to his work. All biß ambition and energy were gone out of him, and he would scarcely have exerted himself even it he had been promoted from the position of messenger to that of station-master of the biggest station on the railway.

" After a while," he goes on to say, " a dull heavy pain struck me in the back, so I couldn't stoop over. What I suffered from this and the other things put together, I have no words to describe. I had six months of it, and it was like six years. In such a case a man takes medicines ; all he is told about. This I did, without getting good from them, and I got weaker and weaker. Every* thing was a trouble to me ; I couldn't bear things I used to think nothing of.

"In December, 1890, just before Christmas it was, I first heard of Mother Seigel's Syrup, and what it had done in cases like mine. I got a bottle from Mr Rogers' Drug Stores, and before I had used all of it I felt wonderfully better ; and by keeping on with it a short time every pain and ache went out of me, and I was able to go about my work as well as ever I was in my life." These facts are vouched for by H Rogers, Esq., Town Commissioner, Mullinigar.

Now, wbat made Messenger McCormack's nerves so sensitive, and hia life so miserable for six months. Indigestion and dyspepsia ; the same detestable malady that does the same ili turn for millions of others, men and women, of all sorts and conditions. Plenty of them will read this true and simple story, and oar opinion is— founded on the best of proofs— that if they tried the remedy which cured McCormack they will come out of it as happily as he did. But the sooner the better.