There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam.  It would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush herself behind the Welch’s grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes notes on flapperiana.  Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.

Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia.  And now N. Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies.  Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day.

Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or drugstore.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day’s journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot.

But I was speaking of hay fever.  “Although not dangerous to life,” say Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, “it causes at certain times such extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their ordinary pursuits.  If we accept the view that it is a disease of the classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few.  When the intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like gout, as a sign of breeding.  It will be assumed by those who have it not....  As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin filled with dynamite.” (vide “Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis,” reprinted from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L.  Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet.  I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand.  Their essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)

I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature.  Upon the literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results.  These intellectuals were not more immune than myself.  For instance, this is the spasm ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River: