But I also made up my mind that I would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor to master it while the mastering was good.
This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence.

I was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of malaria.

Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's, jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand.

Recalling these early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present symptoms--if symptoms they were.

I took quinine until my ears rang so that persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the chimes.