lt of intellectual inebriation, with always corresponding
exhaustion as the direct result. This weakness compelled me to waste the
least time on people who could not interest me, and to spend much time
alone to recharge my exhausted batteries.

For such a case as mine there is not to-day to be found an intelligent
hint in any medical text-book as to the physiological way to recovery.

The breakfasts in my house were of a character that, without ham,
sausage, eggs, steaks, or chops, they would not have been considered
worth spending time over. I had reached a time when a general collapse
seemed to be impending; but it was stayed for a few years by the new
life that came to me through the evolutions of health in the rooms of
the sick that seemed to portend possible professional glories: but as
the years went on I suffered more and more from nervous prostration
through waste of power in the stomach.

My friends began to enlarge upon my wretched looks, and with no little
concern; but none were wise enough to realize that my need was for words
that reminded of life and not of death.

By chance I met an old friend on the street when he happened to be
thinking about ways in daily food in Europe, from which he had just
returned, and at once he began to talk, not about my wretched looks, but
about the exceedingly light breakfasts customary in all the great
centres where he had been. They consisted only of a roll and a cup of
coffee. I was impressed just enough not to forget the fact, but without
there being a hint in it to set me to thinking.

But the time came, "the fulness of time." There came a morning when for
the first time I remembered that when in ordinary health I had no desire
to breakfast; but there was a sense of such general exhaustion from
power wasted over an unusual food mass not needed at the previous
evening meal that my morning coffee was craved as the morning dram by
the chronic toper. Only this, and a forenoon resulted of such comfort of
body, such cheer, and such mental and physical energy as had never been
realized since my young manhood was happy in the blessed
unconsciousness of having a stomach that, no matter how large or how
numerous the daily meals, never complained.

As for the dinner that followed, it was taken with an acuteness of
relish and was handled with a power of digestion that were also a new,
rich experience; but the afternoon fell far short of the forenoon. The
experience was so rema