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_.




Oliver Wendell Holmes