212 SPORT INDEED 



trousers if he has any desire or expectation of getting 

 into them again. Every man who has ever put on a 

 pair of unmentionables knows that the operation is 

 accompanied by a certain amount of stooping. Of 

 course, stooping is an easy matter to most people, but 

 not to a man with lumbago. It would be easier, and 

 perhaps more pleasant for him, to dive from the roof 

 of a sky-scraper. 



When I first tackled this complaint, or — to be pre- 

 cise — when it first tackled me, I was on one of my 

 hunting trips. Now, it is quite bad enough when the 

 shabby disease pitches upon a man in the midst of 

 civilized surroundings ; but when it attacks a hunter 

 in the wilds of a forest, hundreds of miles away from 

 civilization and his home, and throws him on his bed 

 of spruce boughs, helplessly and almost hopelessly 

 squirming with pain and beyond the reach of a 

 doctor's aid, or the aid of anything else to soothe it, 

 his predicament is rather piteous. 



Now I am not the man to squeal before I am hurt — 

 nor even afterwards unless I be convinced that squeal- 

 ing is the proper salve for the wound. No, my milk 

 of courage hasn't enough water in it for that. Yet, al- 

 though squealing may be an unpromising cure for one's 

 harms, I admit that the man who doesn't do a little of 

 it under the twist of a lumbago kink has more of that 

 same milk in his composition than can be found in mine. 



And now for my experience. The reader will find 



