For many people the subject of hiccups   is a joke, but for Harry Mendes, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from Birmingham, it was something quite different. His hiccups began one Sunday lunch time and continued day and night for two weeks. After the first week, Harry's parents took him to hospital, but it took another week for the doctors to cure his attack. Harry, who is now back at school, described what happened to him. "When I began to hiccup, I drank a glass of water but that didn't do any good. That evening I had hiccups every four seconds. We tried everything to stop them. I held my breath and drank cold drinks. My father even tried to give me a shock but that didn't work either." After a week of sleepless nights, he went to hospital. The doctors took an X-ray of his chest but they couldn't find anything wrong. "They gave me some medicine and my hiccups slowed down, but it was another week before the medicine worked completely and my hiccups stopped." Harry was very lucky. The world record holder is the American farmer Charles Osborne, who hiccupped for sixty-eight years. He stopped in 1990 at last, but nobody knows why. Harry's hiccups lasted   _  .
a week fourteen days twenty-eight days one month