One day, not a great while ago, Mr. Middlerib read in his favorite
paper a paragraph stating that the sting of a bee was a sure cure for
rheumatism, and citing several remarkable instances in which people
had been perfectly cured by this abrupt remedy. Mr. Middlerib thought
of the rheumatic twinges that grappled his knees once in awhile and
made his life a burden.
He read the article several times and pondered over it. He understood
that the stinging must be done scientifically and thoroughly. The
bee, as he understood the article, was to be griped by the ears and
set down upon the rheumatic joint and held there until it stung
itself stingless. He had some misgivings about the matter. He knew it
would hurt. He hardly thought it could hurt any worse than the
rheumatism, and it had been so many years since he was stung by a bee
that he had almost forgotten what it felt like. He had, however, a
general feeling that it would hurt some. But desperate diseases
require desperate remedies, and Mr. Middlerib was willing to undergo
any amount of suffering if it would cure his rheumatism.
He contracted with Master Middlerib for a limited supply of bees;
humming and buzzing about in the summer air, Mr. Middlerib did not
know how to get them. He felt, however, that he could safely depend
upon the instincts and methods of boyhood. He knew that if there was
any way in heaven whereby the shyest bee that ever lifted a two
hundred pound man off the clover could be induced to enter a wide-
mouthed glass bottle, his son knew that way.
For the small sum of one dime Master Middlerib agreed to procure
several, to wit: six bees, sex and age not specified; but, as Mr.
Middlerib was left in uncertainty as to the race, it was made
obligatory upon the contractor to have three of them honey and three
humble, or, in the generally accepted vernacular, bumblebees. Mr. M.
did not tell his son what he wanted those bees for, and the boy went
off on his mission with his head so full of astonishment that it
fairly whirled. Evening brings all home, and the last rays of the
declining sun fell upon Master Middlerib with a short, wide-mouthed
bottle comfortably populated with hot, ill-natured bees, and Mr.
Middlerib and a dime. The dime and the bottle changed hands. Mr.
Middlerib put the bottle in his coat pocket and went into the house
eyeing everybody he met very suspiciously, as though he had made up
his mind to sting to death the first person who said "bee" to him. He
confided his guilty secret to none of his family. He hid his bees in
his bedroom, and as he looked at them just before putting them away
he half wished the experiment was safely over. He wished the
imprisoned bees did not look so hot and cross. With exquisite care he
submerged the bottle in a basin of water and let a few drops in on
the heated inmates to cool them off.
At the tea table he had a great fright. Miss Middlerib, in the
artless simplicity of her romantic nature, said:
"I smell bees. How the odor brings up---"
But her father glared at her and said, with superfluous harshness and
execrable grammar: "Hush up! You don't smell nothing."
Whereupon Mrs. Middlerib asked him if he had eaten anything that
disagreed with him, and Miss Middlerib said:
"Why, pa!" and Master Middlerib smiled as he wondered.
Bedtime at last, and the night was warm and sultry. Under various
false pretenses, Mr. Middlerib strolled about the house until
everybody else was in bed, and then he sought his room. He turned the
lamp down until its feeble ray shone dimly as a death-light.
Mr. Middlerib disrobed slowly--very slowly. When at last he was ready
to go lumbering into his peaceful couch, he heaved a profound sigh,
so full of apprehension and grief that Mrs. Middlerib, who was
awakened by it, said if it gave him so much pain to come to bed
perhaps he had better sit up all night. Mr. Middlerib choked another
sigh, but said nothing and crept into bed. After lying still a few
moments he reached out and got his bottle of bees.
It was not an easy thing to do to pick one bee out of the bottle with
his fingers and not get into trouble. The first bee Mr. Middlerib got
was a little brown honey-bee, that wouldn't weigh half an ounce if
you picked him up by the ears, but if you lifted him by the hind leg
would weigh as much as the last end of a bay mule. Mr. Middlerib
could not repress a groan.
"What's the matter with you?" sleepily asked his wife.
It was very hard for Mr. Middlerib to say he only felt hot, but he
did it. He didn't have to lie about it, either. He did feel very hot
indeed--about eighty-six all over, and one hundred and ninety-seven
on the end of his thumb. He reversed the bee and pressed the warlike
terminus of it firmly against the rheumatic knee.
It didn't hurt so badly as he thought it would.
It didn't hurt at all.
Then Mr. Middlerib remembered that when the honey-bee stabs a human
foe it generally leaves its harpoon in the wound, and the invalid
knew that the only thing this bee had to sting with was doing its
work at the end of his thumb.
He reached his arm out from under the sheets and dropped this
disabled atom of rheumatism liniment on the carpet. Then, after a
second of blank wonder, he began to feel round for the bottle, and
wished he knew what he did with it.
In the meantime strange things had been going on. When he caught hold
of the first bee, Mr. Middlerib, for reasons, drew it out in such
haste that for a time he forgot all about the bottle and its remedial
contents, and left it lying uncorked in the bed, between himself and
his innocent wife. In the darkness there had been a quiet but general
emigration from that bottle. The bees, their wings clogged with the
water Mr. Middlerib had poured upon them to cool and tranquillize
them, were crawling aimlessly over the sheet. While Mr. Middlerib was
feeling around for it, his ears were suddenly thrilled and his heart
frozen by a wild, piercing scream from his wife.
"Murder!" she screamed. "Murder! Oh Help me! Help! Help!"
Mr. Middlerib sat bolt upright in bed. His hair stood on end. The
night was warm, but he turned to ice in a minute.
"Where in thunder," he said, with pallid lips, as he felt all over
the bed in frenzied haste, "where in thunder are them infernal bees?"
And a large "bumble," with a sting as pitiless as the finger of
scorn, just then climbed up the inside of Mr. Middlerib's nightshirt,
until it got squarely between his shoulders, and then it felt for his
marrow, and he said calmly:
"Here is one of them."
And Mrs. Middlerib felt ashamed of her feeble screams when Mr.
Middlerib threw up both arms and, with a howl that made the windows
rattle, roared:
"Take him off! Oh, land of Scott, somebody take him off!"
And when the little honey-bee began tickling the sole of Mrs.
Middlerib's foot, she shrieked that the house was bewitched, and
immediately went into spasms.
The household was aroused by this time. Miss Middlerib and Master
Middlerib and the servants were pouring into the room, adding to the
general confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant
questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in
years arrayed in a long night-shirt, pawing fiercely at the
unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an
unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of
the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed
and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the
bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie
stirred up, had dried his legs and wings with a corner of the sheet,
and after a preliminary circle or two around the bed to get up his
motion and settle down to a working gait, he fired himself across the
room, and to his dying day Mr. Middlerib will always believe that one
of the servants mistook him for a burglar and shot him.
No one, not even Mr. Middlerib himself, could doubt that he was, at
least for the time, most thoroughly cured of rheumatism. His own boy
could not have carried himself more lightly or with greater agility.
But the cure was not permanent, and Mr. Middlerib does not like to
talk about it.--_New York Weekly_.
_________
-THE END-
Robert Jones Burdette's short story: Rheumatism Movement Cure
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