GRASSHOPPERS IN HIS STOMACH.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 316, 17 June 1875, Page 3

GRASSHOPPERS IN HIS STOMACH.

[st; Louis Democrat. J

He was from Nebraska. He had eaten nothing but grasshoppers since the 4th of July, 1874, and his stomach was in an awful condition—it was full of grasshoppers. He could feel them jumping about and trying to kick their way out, but their toe nails scratched his alimentary canal, and a spasmodic movement of the muscles of his thorax forced them back into the cavity before they reached the root of his tongue. He had left a wife and nine famished children at home, and had come to St. Louis to collect funds to save his neighbours from starvation. He had not been successful, perhaps because ‘ his credentials ’ were not strong enough. And now if the bar-keeper would accommodate him with a spoonful of whiskey—it was the only thing that would keep the grasshoppers quiet in his stomach ; it kinder stupified them, and caused them to lie dormant for several hours, but as soon as they sobered up theyfbecame as lively as crickets, and played leap frog in the pit of his stomach. He had killed a good many of them with whiskey, but their eggs were all the time hatching, and he believed there were 10,000 live ones occupying the place designed by Nature for the laboratory of bread and meat and such things. He had no money, but if the bar-keeper would trust him for a few drops of crowfoot, he would remunerate him out of his first collections for the sufferers. By adding a little peppermint and a few grains of sugar to the liquor, the medicine would be made more potent ; or if there was no peppermint convenient, a drop of ginger would do as well.

The bar-keeper deeply sympathised with the grasshopper-stricken people of Nebraska. He pitied any man who had grasshoppers in his stomach. If whiskey and peppermint and ginger or anything else his bar afforded, would relieve him, he was welcome to partake. He could not accept thanks for so small a favour; was only sorry he didn’t have whiskey and peppermint enough to destroy all the grasshoppers in Nebraska. The bar-keeper poured two table-spoonsful of Jamaica ginger into a tumbler, adding an equal quantity of pepper sauce, shook in a thimbleful of cayenne pepper, emptied a small vial of sulphuric acid on top, then sprinkled a few drops of tanglefoot over the mixture, and, handing the tumbler to the Nebraskian, told him to “swallow it quick,” The grasshopper plagued stranger waited for no second invitation, but poured the decoction down his throat at one fell swallow. ‘How do you like it?’ asked the barkeeper. The grasshoppered individual made no reply. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and the tears ran out in streams. His mouth was open wide enough to swallow the bar-keeper, and all his decanters. He placed both hands over his stomach, and cast an imploring glance towards the water-pitcher. ‘Do you feel ’em crawl?’ said the barkeeper, in the anxious tone of a sick nurse.

The stranger made no reply, but continued to press his stomach and water the floor with his tears.

‘Take some of this horse-radish,’ said the bar-keeper ; ‘it will do you good.’ The stranger still made no reply, but gradually his mouth grew smaller, his lips contracted, and the air rushed into his throat with a whistling sound like the winter wind through a broken window-pane. At length the bar-keeper took compassion upon his writhing customer and gave him a glass of ice-water to cool his throat. When the stranger was able to speak, he looked reproachfully at the ‘medicine man,’ and said :

‘ See here, stranger, if that’s the kind of stuff you give a man for grasshoppers, I’d like to know what in thunder you’d give a feller if he had a tapeworm !’