The Democratic press. [volume] (Ravenna, O. [Ohio]) 1868-1901, 1883-08-23
Strabismus and Justice,

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 con-
stantly probe the future, the other was
apparently ransacking the dreamy past.
While one rambled among the glorious
possibilities of the remote yet golden ul-
timately, the other sought the somber
| depths of the previously.
He told me that years ago he had q
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 a little
with pair of optical sheep shears. The
effect of this course was to allow the
eye to drift back to 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 out and protrude as it were SO that
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.
It is needless to say that he hungered
for the blood of that physician and sur
geon. He tried to lay violent hands on
him and wipe up the ground with him
and wear him out across telegraph
pole. But the authorities always pre-
vented the administration of swift and
awful justice.
Time passed on till one night the alb
normally wall-eyed man 1oosened O
board in the sidewalk up town so that
the physician and surgeon caught his
foot in it and caused an oblique fracture
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 ortho-
graphy, 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 wear clapboards on
himself for months, and there were 9TH
er doctors and laudable pus and threat
ened gangrene and doctors bills with
the cemetery looming up in the near
future. Day after day he took his own
anti-febrile drinks and rammed his bust
| ed system full of iron and strychnine
and beef tea and dover'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 nuxvomica, tincture of
rhubarb and phosphates and Cruel and
brought him back to life with u crooked
collar bone, shattered shoulder blade
and u look of woe.
Then he sued the town for $50, 900
damages because the sidewalk was i'm
perfect, and the wild-eyed man with the
intlamed nose got on the jury.
l will not explain how it was done,
but there was q 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.-BtH
| Nye.