To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Dohohue, M.D.
Brown Recluse
Spider Is Timid Creature
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
What are the symptoms of a brown recluse spider
bite? A month ago, I got a very itchy spot on my
foot. I squeezed it, and two little specks of
fluid came out. It still itches at times. Could
it cause muscle soreness throughout the body? --
R.H.
ANSWER: The brown
recluse spider is found mostly in southeastern
Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana,
Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Mississippi, Alabama, northern Georgia and
southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and
Iowa. If you don’t live in one of those
places, meeting this spider is unlikely.
The spider is
about 1 inch long (2.54 cm) and has the pattern
of a violin on its back. This is not an
aggressive spider. Only when a human disturbs its
home and only when it happens upon a human’s
skin does it bite. These spiders like to live in
closets, attics, barns and places like wood
piles.
A bite produces
burning pain and redness at the bite site. The
bite gradually turns blue or purple and an ulcer
or blister appears. Both turn black in time.
Bitten people complain of headache, body aches
and often have a fever. They frequently feel sick
to their stomachs, and they might throw up.
Emergency
treatment consists of washing the bite with soap
and water and then applying an ice pack to it to
slow absorption of the spider’s poison. The
bitten site should be elevated, and the person
should then be taken to an emergency department.
Your bite
doesn’t sound like a brown recluse spider
bite. Muscle pains at this late date are unlikely
to be due to a month-old spider bite, especially
since no other typical signs have occurred.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First published October,
1902
Being the Letters
written by John Graham, Head of the House of
Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago,
familiarly known on ‘Change as "Old
Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont,
facetiously known to his intimates as
"Piggy."
No. 6
FROM John Graham,
en route to Texas, to Pierrepont Graham, care of
Graham & Co., Union Stock Yards, Chicago. Mr.
Pierrepont has, entirely without intention,
caused a little confusion in the mails, and it
has come to his father’s notice in the
course of business.
VI
PRIVATE CAR
PARNASSUS,
Aug. 15, 189-
Dear
Pierrepont: Perhaps it’s just as well
that I had to hurry last night to make my train,
and so had no time to tell you some things that
are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning.
Jim Donnelly, of
the Donnelly Provision Company, came into my
office in the afternoon, with a fool grin on his
fat face, to tell me that while he appreciated a
note which he had just received in one of the
firm’s envelopes, beginning
"Dearest," and containing an invitation
to the theatre to-morrow night, it didn’t
seem to have any real bearing on his claim for
shortage on the last carload of sweet pickle hams
he had bought from us.
Of course, I sent
for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for
having a mailing clerk so no-account as to be
writing personal letters in office hours, and
such a blunderer as to mix them up with the
firm’s correspondence. Milligan just stood
there like a dumb Irishman and let me get through
and go back and cuss him out all over again, with
some trimmings that I had forgotten the first
time, before he told me that you were the fellow
who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt pretty
foolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with
something about your still being green and raw,
the ice was mighty thin, and you had the old man
running tiddledies.
It didn’t
make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear
that when Milligan went for you, and asked what
you supposed Donnelly would think of that sort of
business, you told him to "consider the
feelings of the girl who got our brutal refusal
to allow a claim for a few hundredweight of
hams."
I haven’t any
special objection to your writing to girls and
telling them that they are the real sugar-cured
article, for, after all, if you overdo it,
it’s your breach-of-promise suit, but you
must write before eight or after six. I have
bought the stretch between those times. Your time
is money - my money - and when you take half an
hour of it for your own purposes, that is just a
petty form of petty larceny.
Milligan tells me
that you are quick to learn, and that you can do
a powerful lot of work when you’ve a mind
to; but he adds that it’s mighty seldom your
mind takes that particular turn. Your attention
may be on the letters you are addressing, or you
may be in a comatose condition mentally; he never
quite knows until the returns come fro the
dead-letter office.
A man can’t
have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or
stuffed full of odds and ends like a bologna
sausage, and do his work right. It doesn’t
make any difference how mean and trifling the
thing he’s doing may seem, that’s the
big thing and the only thing for him just then.
Business is like oil - it won’t mix with
anything but business.
You can resolve
everything in the world, even a great fortune,
into atoms. And the fundamental principles which
govern the handling of postage stamps and of
millions are exactly the same. They are the
common law of business, and the whole practice of
commerce is founded on them. They are so simple
that a fool can’t learn them; so hard that a
lazy man won’t.
Boys are
constantly writing me for advice about how to
succeed, and when I send them my receipt they say
that I am dealing out commonplace generalities.
Of course I am, but that’s what the receipt
calls for, and if a boy will take these
commonplace generalities and knead them into his
job, the mixture’ll be cake.
Once a
fellow’s got the primary business virtues
cemented into his character, he’s safe to
build on. But when a clerk crawls into the office
in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps
from his stool at night with the spring of a
tiger, I’m a little afraid that if I sent
him off to take charge of a branch house he
wouldn’t always be around when customers
were. He’s the sort of a chap who would hold
back the sun an hour every morning and have it
gain two every afternoon if the Lord would give
him the same discretionary powers that He gave
Joshua. And I have noticed that he’s the
fellow who invariable takes a timekeeper as an
insult. He’s pretty numerous in business
offices; in fact, if the glance of the human eye
could affect a clockface in the same way that a
man’s country cousins affect their city
welcome, I should have to buy a new timepiece for
the office every morning.
I remember when I
was a boy, we used to have a pretty lively
camp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who
was accounted a powerful exhorter in our parts,
would wrastle with the sinners and the
backsliders. There was one old chap in the town -
Bill Budlong - who took a heap of pride in being
the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the last man
to come up to the mourners’ bench at the
camp-meeting and the first one to backslide when
it was over. Used to brag around about what a
hold Satan had on him and how his sin was the
original brand, direct fro Adam, put up in cans
to keep, and the can-opener lost.
Doc Hoover would
get the whole town safe in the fold and then have
to hold extra meetings for a couple of days to
snake in that miserable Bill; but, in the end, he
always got religion and got it hard. For a month
or two afterward, he’d make the chills run
down the backs of us children in prayer-meeting,
telling how he had probably been the triflingest
and orneriest man alive before he was converted.
Then, along toward hog-killing time, he’d
backslide, and go around bragging that he was
standing so close to the mouth of the pit that
his whiskers smelt of brimstone.
He kept this up
for about ten years, getting vainer and vainer of
his staying qualities, until one summer, when the
Elder had rounded up all the likeliest sinners in
the bunch, he announced that the meetings were
over for that year.
You never saw a
sicker-looking man than Bill when he heard that
there wasn’t going to be any extra session
for him. He got up and said he reckoned another
meeting would fetch him; that he sort of felt the
clutch of old Satan loosening; but Doc Hoover was
firm. Then Bill begged to have a special deacon
told off to wrastle with him, but Doc
wouldn’t listen to that. Said he’d been
wasting time enough on him for ten yeas to save a
county, and he had just about made up his mind to
let him try his luck by himself; that what the
really needed more than religion was common-sense
and a conviction that time in this world was too
valuable to be frittered away. If he’d get
that in his head he didn’t think he’d
be so apt to trifle with eternity; and if he
didn’t get it, religion wouldn’t be of
any special use to him.
A big merchant
finds himself in Doc Hoover’s fix pretty
often. There are too many likely young sinners in
his office to make it worth while to bother long
with the Bills. Very few men are worth wasting
time on beyond a certain point, and that point is
soon reached with a fellow who doesn’t show
any signs of wanting to help. Naturally, a green
man always comes to a house in a pretty
subordinate position, and it isn’t possible
to make so much noise with a firecracker as with
a cannon. But you can tell a good deal by what
there is left of the boy, when you come to
inventory him on the fifth of July, whether
he’ll be safe to trust with a cannon next
year.
It isn’t the
little extra money that you may make for the
house by learning the fundamental business
virtues which counts so much as it is the effect
that it has on your character and that of those
about you, and especially on the judgement of the
old man when he’s casting around for the
fellow to fill the vacancy just ahead of you.
He’s pretty apt to pick some one who keeps
separate ledger accounts for work and for fun,
who gives the house sixteen ounces to the pound,
and, on general principles, to pass by the one
who is late at the end where he ought to be
early, and early at the end where he ought to be
late.
I simply mention
these things in passing, but, frankly, I am
afraid that you have a streak of the Bill in you;
and you can’t be a good clerk, let alone a
partner, until you get it out. I try not to be
narrow when I’m weighing up a young fellow,
and to allow for soakage and leakage, and then to
throw in a little for good feeling; but I
don’t trade with a man whom I find
deliberately marking up the weights on me.
This is a fine
country we’re running through, but it’s
a pity that it doesn’t raise more hogs. It
seems to take a farmer a long time to learn that
the best way to sell his corn is on the hoof.
Your affectionate
father,
John Graham.
P.S. I just had to allow
Donnelly his claim on those hams, though I was
dead sure our weights were right, and it cost the
house sixty dollars. But your fool letter took
all the snap out of our argument. I get hot every
time I think of it.
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