AT THE FALL OF THE LEAF.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 38, 21 January 1898, Page 31

AT THE FALL OF THE LEAF.

Why do the leaves fall ? " Bless me, I don't know," you answer. " I suppose because it is one of nature's arrangements." Precisely ; but why did nature so arrange ? Why not have summer time always, with perpetual foliage 1 What is the meaning of denuded branches, withered flowers, daylight fading in midafternoon, and winter's cold and desolation ? When you find out why the leaves fall you will have discovered one of nature's deepest secrets — ivlnj vwn die. Suppose we try an easier problem. Why should Mr. William Steel have written such a sentence as this 1—"1 — " At the fall of the leaf every year I (jot into such a state that I took no pleasure in anything." No doubt there are minds so highly strung as to feel keenly the influence of outward conditions, changes of the weather and of the seasons, and s-o on, but they are rare, and for practical purposes they ought to be rare. Our friend Mr. Steel, happily for him, was not one of them. All the same he was a miserable man every time the leaves began to rattle to the ground. Here's the way he puts it : "At the fall of the leaf every year I felt languid, tired, aivl weary, and took no pleasure in anything. My appetite was poor, and after everything I ate I had pain and fulness at the chest and sides. There was a horrible pain at the pit of my stomach, which nothing relieved." Now this sort of thing would spoil a man's pleasure any time of year, but the oddity in Mr. Steel's case is that it always coincided with what you may call nature's bedtime. " After a few months," he says, '• the pain and distress would be easier for a while, but as autumn approached I became as bad as ever. In September, 1890, I had an unusually bad time of it. I couldn't touch a morsel of food, and presently got so weak I was unable to stand on my legs. Every few hours I had to be poulticed, the pain was so bad. I went to bed and stayed there for a week, with a doctor attending me. He relieved me a little, but somehow he didn't succeed in getting to the bottom of my ailment." That may be, but it doesn't quite follow that the doctor was in the dark as to Mr. Steel's ailment. He might have understood it right enough, yet failed to cure it because he had no remedy for it among his drugs That happens all the while. Still, the reader may ask, What's the good of knowing the nature of a complain if we possess no medicine to cure it ? There you have us ; no use at all, to be sure. Well, Mr. Steel goes on to say : " For some time I continued very feeble, and was hardly able to walk across the floor. If I took a short walk I felt so tired and done up I didn't know where to put myself. This was year after year for six years. '•Finally, I read about the popular medicine called Mother Seigel's Curative Syrup, and made up my mind to try it. So I began and kept on with it for some time. The result was that the pain left me, and my appetite waked up, and my food tasted good and digested well ; and presently I was strong and hearty as ever. That was three years ago, and the trouble has never returned. (Signed) William Steel, Hambleton, near Oakham, Rutlandshire, December .")th, 1893." Mr. Steel is grocer and postmaster at Hambleton, and his case is well known there. His complaint isn't hard to see through ; it was indigestion and dyspepsia. But why did it come on only in the autumn ? What had the fall of the leaf to do with it ? Let the reader study on that point. Meanwhile it is a comfort to know that Mother Seigel's Syrup will cure it no matter when it comes on.

Freedom is the one purport, "wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man'b struggles, toilings, and sufferings on this earth. — Carlyle.