lways said it was doing 'im good. 'E'd argue that
it freshened up 'is liver. It was 'is liver that 'e seemed to live
for--didn't appear to 'ave any other interest in life. It was the same
with 'is food. One year it would be nothing but meat, and next door to
raw at that. One of them medical papers 'ad suddenly discovered that we
were intended to be a sort of wild beast. The wonder to me is that 'e
didn't go out 'unting chickens with a club, and bring 'em 'ome and eat
'em on the mat without any further fuss. For drink it would be boiling
water that burnt my fingers merely 'andling the glass. Then some other
crank came out with the information that every other crank was
wrong--which, taken by itself, sounds natural enough--that meat was fatal
to the 'uman system. Upon that 'e becomes all at once a raging, tearing
vegetarian, and trouble enough I 'ad learning twenty different ways of
cooking beans, which didn't make, so far as I could ever see, the
slightest difference--beans they were, and beans they tasted like,
whether you called them _ragout a la maison_, or cutlets _a la
Pompadour_. But it seemed to please 'im.

He was never pig-headed.

"Then vegetarianism turned out to be the mistake of our lives. It seemed
we made an error giving up monkeys' food. That was our natural victuals;
nuts with occasional bananas. As I used to tell 'im, if that was so,
then for all we 'ad got out of it we might just as well have stopped up a
tree--saved rent and shoe leather. But 'e was one of that sort that
don't seem able to 'elp believing everything they read in print. If one
of those papers 'ad told 'im to live on the shells and throw away the
nuts, 'e'd have made a conscientious endeavour to do so, contending that
'is failure to digest them was merely the result of vicious
training--didn't seem to 'ave any likes or dislikes of 'is own. You
might 'ave thought 'e was just a bit of public property made to be
experimented upon.

"One of the daily papers interviewed an old gent, as said 'e was a
'undred, and I will say from 'is picture as any'ow 'e looked it. 'E said
it was all the result of never 'aving swallowed anything 'ot, upon which
my gentleman for a week lives on cold porridge, if you'll believe me;
although myself I'd rather 'ave died at fifty and got it over. Then
another paper dug up from somewhere a sort of animated corpse that said
was a 'undred and two, and attributed the unfortunate fact to 'is alw