Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 82, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1919 — RELIEVED HIS MIND [ARTICLE]

RELIEVED HIS MIND

Sumner Shaw Tells of His Defeat of Insomnia. Possibly There Are Others Who Would Sleep More Peacefully, if They Squared Up With Conscience, as He Did. The schoolmaster, who with others was whiling away an hour in Squire Marr’s office, complained that he had not been sleeping well lately. He dignified his trouble by calling it Insomnia. As might have been expected, the squire had a specific. “The thing to do," he said, “is to make your mind as near a blank as possible. When I find that my mind Is disposed to work overtime. I resort to-the old nursery jingle: The House That Jack Built.’ I repeat it rather slowly from beginning to end, and go over it again and again. To me the rhythm is very soothlpg, and the pictures that the words call up are constantly changing, just as in dreams. Presently I begin to get a little tangled up, so that perhaps it will be the priest all shaven and shorn that milks the cow with the crumpled horn. It Is not long after that before I drop into real slumber that lasts until I am awakened, may be, by the cock that crows in the morn.” “Did you ever try reckoning Interest as a means of inducing sleep?" asked Sumner Shaw, the carriage maker. “As a rule, Pm not much subject to insomnia," he went on. “But I got an Inkling of what it is like when I was staying overnight at my nephew’s in the city, four years ago, or so. They make long evenings, and It must have been close on to ten before I got off to bed. “ ‘Remember that you don’t have to get up at some unseemly hour, Uncle Summer,’ says Susie. ‘We don’t have breakfast until eight.’ “Well, I dropped right off to sleep, same as usual; but when I woke up and turned on the electric light at the head of the bed, I found it was only three o’clock. * ‘Now, then,’ says I to myself, ‘l’ll have to get another nap.’ “But that was easier said than done. The harder I tried the wider awake I was. I guess it was insomnia, fast enough. Finaljy I got to thinking over my past life. Well, probably I’d done worse things in my life, but what I seemed to fasten on was a little business transaction with the Widow Wiggin. I sold her a sleigh at my own price; and the very next day I sold one Just like it to Cap’n Gray, and he beat me down five dollars, and I made something at that. In the circumstances I felt as if it would be no more than fair to go to Mrs. Wiggin and make her the same discount. But you are apt to let such things go, and pretty soon she took sick and died. She had no immediate family, and the property went to distant connections out of the state. So I kind of let the thing slide, as being of no great consequence, anyway. “But it loomed up big there in the dark, and at last I had to promise myself that if I lived to get home I’d get clear of that five dollars somehow. At that time a Belgian relief fund was being raised, and I concluded that it would please her as much as anything, if she could know it, to put down a subscription in memory of Mrs. Maria Wiggin. “Having settled that, I felt easier, but not real sleepy, as it still seemed a long to breakfast time. Then it occured to me that about eighteen years’ interest ought to go with that five dollars, and I fell to considering how much that would be. I am pretty good at figuring in my head, and I could have worked out the simple Interest easily; but compound interest is another matter. However, I began casting it up, and I got as tar as the fifth year. Then the next thing I knew Susie was singing out: Breakfast, Uncle Sumner !’ “So you see, reckoning Interest got the better of insomnia that time. Hebbe, though, purging my conscience had something to do with it. You are • welcome to both of these remedies, Mr. Jenkins,” he added with a friendly wink, “In case the squire’s doesn’t work.” —Youth’s Companion.