If that’s the case I’m glad the Japs put the boots to the Czar.  I wish they would go after him again and kick his crown off.

I’ll bet even money that the father of the first grip germ must have been a bombshell and his mother was some relation to one of Kuropatkin’s retreats.

It’s dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the busiest idea that was ever chased by a doctor.

Nobody knows just how or when the grip germs break into the system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis nothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.

The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.

From one small germ there will arise and go forth a family the size of which was never dreamed of in the philosophy of our wise and busy President.

I don’t know just exactly how they happened to warm wise to me, but a newly married couple of grip germs took a notion to build a nest somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus, and two hours later they had about 233 children attending the public school in my medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out for recess I would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my top-knot.

Before the next morning came all these grip children had graduated from school and after tearing down the school-house the whole bunch had married and had large families of their own, and all hands were out paddling their canoes on my alimentary canal.

By nine o’clock that morning there must have been eighty-five million grip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to shoot their initials over the walls of my interior department.

It was fierce!

When the doctor arrived on the scene I was carrying enough concealed weapons to exterminate the entire Japanese army.

I’m up to one thing and that is that the Russians couldn’t beat the Japs because all the national energy and vitality emigrated from St. Petersburg and came over here with the first grip germs.

If the Czar of all the Russians had been a wise Little Father he would have encouraged the grip germs to remain loyal to their native land and then he could have sent them out to Manchuria to bite the ramparts out of General Oyama instead of chasing inoffensive American citizens into the drug stores.

“Well, anyway the medicine mixer blew in, threw his saws behind the sofa, put his dip net on the mantlepiece, and took a fall out of my pulse.

“Ah!” he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like a currycomb.

“The same to you, Doc,” I said.

“Ah!” he said, looking hard at the wall.

“Say, Doc!” I whispered; “there’s no use to cut off my leg because the germs will hide in my elbow.”

“Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum near the apex of the cosmopolitan?” inquired the doctor.

“Surest thing you know,” I said.

“Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distant laughter in the panatella?” he asked.