is not uncommon to find a mind taken
up for some hours in wondering whether that last piece of cake will
digest. We can easily see how from this there might be developed a
nervous sensitiveness about eating which would prevent the
individual from eating even the food that is nourishing. This last
is a not unusual form of dyspepsia,--a dyspepsia which keeps itself
alive on the patient's want of nourishment.

Fortunately the process of getting back into the true food-current
is not difficult if one will adopt it The trouble is in making the
bold plunge. If anything is eaten that is afterwards deemed to have
been imprudent, let it disagree. Take the full consequences and bear
them like a man, with whatever remedies are found to lighten the
painful result. Having made sure through bitter experience that a
particular food disagrees, simply do not take it again, and think
nothing about it. It does not exist for you. A nervous resistance to
any sort of indigestion prolongs the attack and leaves, a
brain-impression which not only makes the same trouble more liable
to recur, but increases the temptation to eat forbidden fruit. Of
course this is always preceded by a full persuasion that the food is
not likely to disagree with us now simply because it did before. And
to some extent, this is true. Food that will bring pain and
suffering when taken by a tired stomach, may prove entirely
nourishing when the stomach is rested and ready for it. In that
case, the owner of the stomach has learned once for all never to
give his digestive apparatus work to do when it is tired. Send a
warm drink as a messenger to say that food is coming later, give
yourself a little rest, and then eat your dinner. The fundamental
laws of health in eating are very simple; their variations for
individual needs must be discovered by each for himself.

"But," it may be objected, "why make all this fuss, why take so much
thought about what I eat or what I do not eat?" The special thought
is simply to be taken at first to get into the normal habit, and as
a means of forgetting our digestion just as we forget the washing of
our hands until we are reminded by some discomfort; whereupon we
wash them and forget again. Nature will not allow us to forget. When
we are not obeying her laws, she is constantly irritating us in one
way or another. It is when we obey, and obey as a matter of course,
that she shows herself to be a tender mother, and helps us to a real
comp