ay be gradually cured. I am stating actual
facts. If the evening be spent in conversation, or mere lounging over
books, the supper will not be needed, and will prove, if taken, only a
burden; but if, as has already been said, it be spent in actual
brain-work, the tremendous and unusual strain on the whole nervous
system, occasioned by the destruction of nerve-cells, must be made good,
or those organs most intimately connected with the nervous system and
the sources of life, will be sure to suffer. It must, however, be
repeated here, if we would secure the good results desired, that the
supper must be of _nourishing_, not of stimulating food.

Even the destruction, through exercise, of the inferior muscle-cells
demands food before sleeping. It is no merely fashionable custom which
calls the dancers at an evening entertainment to the loaded
supper-table, as those of my readers who have attended the so-called
cold-water Sociables will bear me witness. It may be seriously
questioned whether the regulation which forbade any refreshment except
cold water was not, like many other unthinking, economical plans, really
no economy at all. Instead of one pantry's furnishing food to the
famished dancers, this was furnished for each one at home, from her own
mother's private stores, and as the members of the Sociables met at each
other's houses in order, the total result of expenditure to each family,
at the close of the winter, was probably the same as it would have been,
had each family furnished, on one evening, a moderate entertainment of
the same sort to the bankrupt systems. Fashion is often wiser than we
think her, especially when at parties for the "German" she prescribes a
cup of beef-tea as the regulation refreshment.

A long, rapid walk in the evening, as we all know, will produce the same
effect. We return, and remark that we are hungry, merely meaning that we
have received polite official notice that our physical bank account has
been overdrawn. If we do not pay any attention to this notification, we
shall surely in time be passed from adversary to judge, and from judge
to officer, and finally be cast literally into a prison from which,
unlike some of our city prisons, we shall not escape till we have paid
the uttermost farthing. Then we shall be likely to receive from the
kindly friend whom we summon to visit us, wise and good advice, on the
extravagance of spending so much. But might not the advice be possibly
quite a