Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
104 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S D oes your health show a marked improvement during the hunting season, and do your honest ailments get scant sympathy from a suspicious household the rest of the year? If so, you are ripe for membership in the order of Misunderstood Husbands, Unincorporated, and entitled to all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining. I know a man who feels like "The Wreck of the Hesperus" for nine months of the year. He chews expensive vitamins. He sits for hours in the doctor's office hunter with dog vignette by bob kuhn– courtesy the remington collection reading magazines. His medicine cabinet is filled with strange nostrums in ill-assorted bottles. He is subject to neuritis and lumbago and is plagued by nondescript aches and pains. His digestion is so bad that he pays dearly for the slightest dietary indiscretion. And night brings him little respite; for sleep, sweet sleep that so poetically "knits up the raveled sleeve of care," leaves him fagged and haggard. Nightmares use him to practice up on. His family regards him, and perhaps not without provocation, as moody and irritable. This fellow is really in an unenviable fix, but somehow he manages to drag his creaking chassis along . . . until November comes. He is not a malingerer. Nor a neurotic. Nor one of those who enjoy bad health and revel in imaginary symptoms. He is honestly ailing. Once he went to a famous diagnostician who examined him for three days, charged him $100, and said: "You will live forever and feel like hell." The second part of the diagnosis he can verify, the first part he is not so keen about verifying. Forever is too definite. But when the first frost comes there is a noticeable improvement in his health. And when quail season arrives he is a new man. Tonics and elixirs and tinctures of this-and- that are consigned to the attic. The medical profession has to eke out its existence without his munificent patronage. He is no longer susceptible to colds, neuritis, and lumbago, although he tramps the countryside in the unfriendliest of