pounds by reason of
the larger degree of muscle exercise. Since last writing, this word has
come from Miss K., who one year ago was at the asylum eating several
meals a day in bed with suicidal intent. She left that bed with a weight
of one hundred and forty pounds, and, as I have mentioned before, lost
twenty pounds of it by her fast. My last news is from a letter written
the day after a twenty-five-mile ride among the mountains with a soul as
free and joyous as there are freedom and joy with the birds whose songs
greeted her rapt ears from every treetop. She writes of a gain of
twenty-four pounds since the fast, and states that the glasses she has
worn for thirteen years are wanted no longer!

I feel that I need not multiply words as to the ability and utility of
bringing all overweight down to the physiological normal and of keeping
it there. I could fill hundreds of pages with the joyous testimonies of
those who have been relieved of many surplus pounds, with numerous
accompanying ailings; they all tell the same story, and I will only add
this, that there is no physiological excuse for any mortal to carry
around weight that disables.

Not very many months ago ex-Governor Flower, of New York, a statesman of
national fame, a man of largest public spirit, a most valuable citizen,
and Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an orator of world-wide fame and of great
nobility of soul, dropped as beeves beneath the stroke of an ax because
of a fracture of brittle bloodvessels. In both of these cases not many
less pounds than a hundred had needlessly accumulated.

Could I have had the Colonel's ear when I last saw him as a listener to
almost matchless oratory, whose rotundity of belt was to be measured by
the yard, I would have addressed him as follows: "My dear Colonel, when
I last saw you you were just filled out enough to be the joy of your
tailor, and as a picture of health in form and looks you were ideal. You
were then eating the meals of a woodchopper; and merely because food
tastes good and does not seem to hurt you, you have been doing the same
during the nearly score and a half of years since I have seen you. You
have been eating more food every day in proportion to general muscle
exercise than the hardest toiler does in a week, and your vast bulk
evidences against you."

After explaining to him the structural possibilities of apoplexy as a
legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue:
"Now by virtue