The good fortune of yesterday, July 29, 1903, brought a telephone
message from an old and very dear friend who has been impressed with
the virtues of buccal digestion for the past five years. Five years
ago my friend was a sick man, past fifty years of age. During his youth
and early manhood he had been an optimist among optimists, leading a
congenial life among agreeable friends, with the best the world had to
offer in the way of recreation and fare. His great misfortune at the
time was indigestion and the troubles that accompany indigestion. If
he drank a small cup of coffee at night he could not sleep, and he was
subject to the constant uncertainty of health and frequent recurrence
of acute diseases that are common to the victims of luxury.
The very ill-health emergency and dilemma of my friend led him to
catch at any stray straw of hope or comfort. When we met, some months
after the beginning of my experiments, he was compelled to note a
great difference in my appearance; the portly and robust but heavy,
short-winded and unwieldy friend of bygone years in sumptuous New
Orleans had become "spare" and active, and told of improvement in
health-conditions that seemed almost miraculous. The still-suffering
friend was interested to the point of listening and trying the remedy.
Half as a joke and half in earnest the regimen recommended by me was
adopted and carried forward far enough to secure some noticeable good
results. Following up these favourable results with continuance of
the regimen brought progressive improvement of health and increasing
conviction of the merits of thorough buccal digestion.
The evidence of physical improvement resulting from five years'
attention to buccal thoroughness in the ordinary course of an
adventurous life is here given briefly from memory fresh from the
telling:
"You remember the state of health I was in when we met here in the
Waldorf five years ago. The benefit of the recovery that I had
secured at Sierra Blanca had been gradually lost, and I was pretty
well down to my last legs again. If I hadn't been struck by the
marvellous alteration in your appearance from what it was when I had
seen you last, I should have been terribly bored by your relation
of your experience, for I was sick to death of mention of cures and
diet-regimens of all sorts. But you astonished me so by your changed
appearance, and I was in such a hopeless condition, that I thought
I would give your scheme a trial. Next day, my breakfast, which was
also my lunch, for I was feeling too badly to get up earlier, brought
me some sweet corn as one of the several items I habitually ordered.
In giving this corn thorough chewing before swallowing I noticed
that, while the inside of the corn liquefied readily and was quickly
swallowed, there remained in my mouth a collection of the hulls, and
these invited the bad table-manners of 'spitting out.' I removed this
collection of refuse as delicately as possible, and, on examination,
found that it consisted of hard substance that I had never noticed
before in connection with cooked sweet corn. This set me to thinking.
What had I not been putting into my stomach all these years in my
ignorance of the constituents of this one kind of common food, and what
not in other foods that I had not yet observed?
"In continuing the observation further, I discovered that many of
the foods that I was accustomed to take contained hard, insoluble
ingredients or cottony fibre that got more and more cottony and
refractory with mastication. In trying coffee, my favourite beverage,
as you told me I might do if I handled it rightly in the mouth, I
tasted it until it was absorbed or swallowed involuntarily just as
you told me the expert wine-tasters and tea-tasters do. I sipped
and enjoyed my small cup of coffee as I had never done before in my
life, and knew afterwards that it had not hurt me as usual, as no
immediate protest came from the stomach, which formerly had been the
case. I slept the 'sleep of the just' that night, and awoke in fine
form next morning. From that day to this I have not been troubled with
indigestion, and during these five years I have not been sick a day
or an hour or a moment, and have slept like a babe. I haven't kept my
weight quite down where it ought to be for best comfort, but I have
supported the burden with my general good health and digestion. My
temptations to lapse have been enormous, for I have had the good fare
of two continents thrown at me by most enticing invitation, and I have
run the gantlet of extraordinary _menus_ without phasing, with the
results I have recounted.
"Do you remember the day of the public funeral of General Grant, when
his tomb on the Riverside Drive--Morningside Heights--was dedicated?
You remember that we had been invited to Mr. H----'s to witness the
parade and take lunch? How we were caught on the wrong side of the
procession on Fifth Avenue and were hurrying to get ahead of the column
and across to the other side of the Avenue? Well! do you remember
how we puffed and blowed when we had run a couple of blocks and how
we were red in the face and nearly knocked up? We were both fat then
and short-winded, and we never would have been able to get to our
destination if I had not hypnotised a policeman and persuaded him to
lead us across the Avenue like a pair of emergency hospital cases or
disorderly arrests.
"Since then you have had your experience of recovery as the result of
your deliberate experiment made for a purpose, and I have had mine as
the result of noting the improvement in you, and for all of which I owe
you my life, whatever that may be worth.
"At the time of the great Naval Review, or something of the sort--I
have forgotten what--a party of us went to the pier of the Southern
Pacific Company to see the show. There were Ned H----, and Captain
H----, and two other men, and myself, with four ladies. On coming up
town we were booked for another engagement, the time for which had not
yet arrived. We were in the vicinity of the Hoffman House and drifted
in there and into the ball-room. The floor was most tempting and the
orchestrion willing. It was too suggestive a combination for the
ladies, who were young and fine dancers, and they exclaimed with one
voice, 'Oh, how lovely! I wish we might dance.' It proved that I was
the only dancing-man among the men. I had been a dancer in my younger
days, but I had let up on it since I had become stout. However, by way
of a joke and to please the young ladies, I offered to be a partner. My
offer was accepted, also as a joke, but the sequel was a surprise. We
set the orchestrion going on a Waldteufel waltz, and I grabbed one of
the young ladies for a round. Really, I was amazed. I danced as easily
as I did when a youngster, and round and round we went. Finally, my
partner begged for a rest, so I waltzed her to a seat, and, excited
with the revelation of an endurance I did not know I possessed, I
grabbed the next lady from her seat and repeated the tiring-out process
as easily as in the first attempt. There were yet two ladies fresh and
eager to assist in 'doing Uncle Nat up,' and I repeated the performance
with them, also, dancing the last to a dead standstill on account of
her determined obstinacy. _She_ had to complete the 'doing up' of the
old man, or Age would win a battle from Youth, which would never do.
Well, to make a long story short, and to get to the illustration. I was
warm and ruddy, but I was less fatigued than I remember to have been as
a youngster when I had danced for a long time.
"Since then I have not balked at any feat of physical endurance, and I
feel as young to-day as my white hair will let me. I have tried to get
my friends to chewing their food persistently, and have gained many
adherents to your cause, but I have had to stand an immense amount of
chaffing meanwhile. I tried to get Mr. H---- to chew his bread and
milk, but he always laughed at me, and chaffed me constantly when I was
with him about my chewing fad. One man, whom I saw much of, and who
needed your advice more than anybody else, got so sick of the subject
that when I received a letter from you, telling of some new discovery
and some new triumph of the cause of chewing, I would attempt to read
it to him; but he would not listen, and persisted in calling it rot,
although he knew that I had become a remarkably well man, whereas I was
formerly a very sick man. Both of these scoffers have gone and I am
left, as chipper and as fit as a fiddle new-strung for the music of a
happy life. If we don't catch up with Luigi Cornaro on our record it
will not be for want of good digestion."
This is a little bit of intimacy that the good Baron Randolph Natili
will not object to offer in evidence in our cause; for no one living
has a heart and a will to do a favour or spread a benefit more than he.
Only yesterday he said, in a burst of enthusiasm, "How is it possible
for me to dislike any one, feeling the way I do? I have likes immensely
stronger than other likes on account of similar or closer sympathies,
but it seems to me now that to really dislike any one that the Creator
has made, or anything that he has created, would do violence to the
Memory of My Mother."