St. Landry democrat., 1883-08-25
Strabismus and Justice.

Il
Over in St Paul met man with
eyes of cadet blue and terra Gotta nose.
His eyes were not only peculiar in shape,
but while one seemed to constantly
probe the future, the other was appar-
entity ransacking the dreamy past.
While one rambled among the glorious
possibilities of the remote yet golden Ill
timately, the other sought the somber
depths of the previously.
He told me that years ago he had a
mild case of strabismus and that both
eyes seemed to glare down his nose till
he got restless and had them operated
on. Those were the days when they
used to fasten crochet hook under the
internal rectus muscle and cut it lit
tie with q pair of optical sheep shears.
The effect of this course was to allow
the eye to drift back to a direct line, but
this man fell into the hands of drunk
en- surgeon who cut the muscle too
much and thereby weakened it SO that
it Gradually swung past the point it
ought to have stopped at and he saw
with horror that his eye was going to
turn olt and protrude as it were SO that
Il man could hang his hat on it. The
other followed suit and the two orbs
that had for years looked along the
bridge Of the terra Gotta nose, gradually
separated, and while one looked toward
next Christmas with fond anticipations,
the other loved to linger over the re-
membranes of last fall.
This thing continued till he had to
peer into the future with his off eye
closed and vice versa
1t is needless to say that he hungered
for the blood of that physician and
surgeon. He tried to lay violent hands
on him and wipe up the ground with
him and wear him out across q tele-
graph pole But the authorities always
prevented the administration of swift
and awful justice.
Time passed on till one night the alb
normally wall-eyed man loosened a
board in the sidewalk uptown SO that
the physician and surgeon caught his
foot in it and caused an oblique tract
ure of the scapula, pied his dura mater,
busted his cornucopia and wrecked his
sarahbellum-
Perhaps / am in error as to some of
these medical terms and their orthog-
raphy, but that is about the way the
man with the divergent orbs told it to
me.
The physician and surgeon was quite
a ruin. He had to weas3clapboards on
himself for months, and there were
other doctors and laudable pus and
threatened gangrene and doctors bills
Mith the cemetery looming up in the
near future. Day after day he took his
own anti-febrile drinks and rammed his
busted system full of iron and strych-
nine and beef tea and Doyer's powders
and hypodermic squirt till he wished he
could die, but death would not come.
He paved the air and howled. They
fed him his own nux vomica, tineture Of
rhubarb and phosphates and Cruel, and
brought him back to Life with a crooked
collar bone, a shattered shoulder blade
and look of woe.
Then he sued the town for fifty thou
sand dollars damages because the side
walk was imperfect, and the wild-eyed
man with the infiamed nose got on the
jury.
l viii not explain how it was done,
but there was a verdict for defendant
with costs on the Esculapian wreck.
The man with the crooked vision is not
handsome, but he is very happy. He
says the mills of the gods grind slowly,
but they pulverize middling fine. Bill
Nae, in Detroit Free Press.
A s