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

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 13, 13 January 1893, Page 7

" 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 they weie addressed wasn't within ten feet of the bowler, and wouldn't have come closer for his life. Tae scene was a big business office in New York, and the bowler was the chief man in it. He owned the concern, and waa very rich, and a decent fellow enough. Bat sometimes be would break oat like that, and howl ai though he had just discovered a fire in a powder mill. You could hear him from the basement of the roof. What was the matter with him f Temporary insanity 1 Not quite, but something nearly as bad. He had an acute attack of gout in his toe, and at those Bolemn crises he couldn't bear the sight of even a shadow moving in his direction. Ask somebody who has the gout how it feels. Fancy a blacksmith twisting your toe with hot pinchers while a shoemaker is thrusting % bradawl through your kneejoint. That's a little like it. Well, there are things not so bad as gout, yet they make us touchy enough. Here comes a man, for instance, who says, " Overt/* thing now mas a trouble to me." Wbat should he talk that way for ? Why should everything have been a trouble to him 1 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 1

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 tight and sound. The mind is on the look-out for cvil — the man ia depressed and afraid. Every word means mischief, and every bush hides an enemy. So he thinks. He knows what Solomon meant when he eaid, •■The grasshopper is a burden."

Mr Michael McCormack is a railway messenger and lives in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland. In June, 1890, he was taken ill. His mouth tasted foul and coppery, his stomach wa3 sour and dead, and when he forced down a little food he felt so much distress and pain after it that he was sorry be hadn't let it alone and gone hungry. Besides this there were pains wandering through his chest, back, and sides, hurting him, biting here and there like ugly dogs loose in a town His head swam with dizziness and he couldn't gi to his work. All hiß ambition and energy were gone out of him, and he would scarcely have e xerted himself even i( he had beet* 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 cay, "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 wordß to describe. I had si* months of it, and it was like six years. In such a case a man takeß medicines ; all be is told about. Thiß I did, without getting good from them, and I got weaker and weaker. Everything was a trouble to me ; I couldn't bear things 1 used to think nothing of. " Tn 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 Commisßioner, Mullingar. Now, wbat made Messenger McCormack's nerves bo sensitive, and his life so miserable for six months. Indigestion and dyspepsia ; the same detestable malady lhat does the same ill turn for millions of others, men and womeo, of all sorts and conditions. Plenty of them will read this true and simple story, and our 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 Booner the better.