_A Sunday Discussion_
"I say, Tom," said the Doctor, on Sunday morning, after the breakfast
things had been cleared away, and the first fire had been lighted in the
new fireplace, "I want to ask you something about your experience on
your hunting trips."
"Go on, Doctor. No boy of sixteen--and we've voted you to be of that
age--can ask me anything that I'll hesitate to answer."
"Thank you," said the Doctor, with a laugh. "Now, think of me as exactly
sixteen and tell me all about it. As I understand, you have frequently
spent from a week to ten days in the mountains, living exclusively upon
what you could kill."
"So far, Doctor, you are absolutely right," answered the boy, who,
having laid aside his headache, was disposed to be facetious.
"Well, that must have been animal food exclusively," said the Doctor.
"Absolutely," answered Tom. "I had always a little of the mineral food
salt to season it with, but as for bread or potatoes, or anything else
of a vegetable character, why I simply couldn't get them."
"All right. Now, the theory is that a man must have starchy foods in
order to keep in good health. You had no starchy food for from a week to
two weeks at a time on each of these occasions, but lived exclusively on
meat. Now, what effects of this diet did you observe?"
"None whatever, except that little Tom Ridsdale had a mighty keen relish
for bread when he got home again."
The Doctor then asked detailed questions as to particular symptoms, to
all of which the substance of Tom's replies was that in his case no
symptoms whatever had manifested themselves. "I think, Doctor," he
added, "as the result of my own experience that a healthy young human
animal like me, when living night and day in the open air and taking a
great deal of exercise, can eat pretty much anything he pleases that we
commonly recognize as food, or rather anything of that kind that he can
get--without much danger of injuring himself. No, I don't know so well
about that. Once, I got hurt in the mountains, and lived for a week in a
barn, eating nothing but corn. I was all right in a general way, but I
suffered a good deal with cold. When I got out and killed a 'coon and
roasted and ate it, the weather seemed suddenly to warm up."
"Precisely," answered the Doctor. "The fat of the coon furnished you
with fuel, and you needed it. The more I study the subject, the more
firmly convinced I become of two things--first, that man is essentially
a carnivorous, or meat-eating animal, and second, that while starchy
foods are desirable as a part of his diet, they are not absolutely
necessary to him, except at comparatively long intervals. You know a
baby simply cannot digest starchy foods at all. It would starve to death
with a stomach full of them. Every baby lives exclusively upon the
animal food milk."
"Yes," answered Jack, "but so does every colt and every calf. Yet,
neither horses nor cows eat any animal food whatever after they cease to
be colts and calves."
"That is true," said the Doctor, meditatively. "I hadn't thought of
that." Then, after a minute's thought, he added--"but neither cows nor
horses have any carnivorous teeth whatever, any teeth fit for the
chewing of meat, while man has. Besides that, physicians have observed
that behind almost every case of obstinate, low fevers and that sort of
debilitated disease, there is a history of underfeeding, and
particularly of an insufficient use of meat, whether as a matter of
necessity, or merely as a matter of choice. Persons who eat no meat, or
very little meat, may seem very robust so long as positive disease does
not attack them, but when they contract maladies of a serious sort, they
are very likely to show a lack of stamina, a deficiency of recuperative
power."
"Then you don't believe at all, any more than we meat-eating Virginians
do--in the doctrines of the vegetarians?" asked Jack, as he finished the
hind legs of a broiled squirrel.
"It will be time enough," answered the Doctor, "to consider the
doctrines of the vegetarians when they agree among themselves as to what
those doctrines are."
"Why, how do you mean?" asked Tom.
"Well, some vegetarians held a congress, or a convention, or something
of that sort in New York a little while ago. There were only fifty-seven
of them present, I believe, and yet they managed to split their congress
up into four groups, each antagonizing the views of all the others with
something approaching violence of temper."
"What were their differences?" asked Tom.
"Well first of all there was a group who advocated the eating of
vegetable matters only, except that they saw no harm in the use of milk,
eggs, cheese and butter. Next there was a group who bitterly condemned
milk, eggs, cheese and butter as animal foods, tending to inflame evil
passions and utterly to be rejected, though they ate milk biscuit and
butter crackers. This second group looked with favor upon all fruits and
vegetables, but here a third group took issue with them, contending that
only those vegetables should be eaten which grow above ground, and
utterly rejecting the thought of eating potatoes, parsnips, beets,
turnips, onions, carrots, radishes and other things that develop beneath
the surface of the earth. Finally there was a fourth group that agreed
with the third except that they made a plea in behalf of celery, on the
ground that it is naturally a plant growing above ground and is
artificially imbedded in earth only by way of making it tender and
palatable."
"But how about circuses then?" asked Tom.
"I don't understand," the Doctor answered.
"Why how can anybody go to a circus without eating peanuts? And about
three-fourths of all the peanuts are developed under ground by burying
the blossoms."
"It's all very funny," said Jack. "But the funniest thing about it is
the fetish worship of that word 'vegetable.' Patent medicines are often
advertised as 'purely vegetable,' as if that settled the question of
their harmlessness. Yet I know at least a dozen 'purely vegetable'
plants that grow in these woods which are poisonous."
"Of course," answered the Doctor, "and for that matter the most virulent
poisons known to man are 'purely vegetable.' There's strychnia for
example, as purely vegetable in its origin as apple-butter itself is.
And there are others, such as morphine, stramonium, and nux vomica and
worst of all hydrocyanic acid, commonly called prussic acid. That is so
deadly that it is almost never made or kept in its pure state, because a
single whiff of its fumes in the nostrils would kill almost instantly.
Yet it is an extract of peach pits or bitter almonds."
"Well now I say," broke in Tom, "let's return to the subject of foods,
for I am hungry, and I'm going to declare war on the Doctor if he
doesn't let me have some light thing to eat like a chop from that wild
boar or something of an equally digestible sort."
"Well, we'll see about that," said the Doctor, going to Tom's bed and
examining and redressing his wounds. After the inspection he said:
"You were entirely right, Tom, when you called yourself a perfectly
healthy human animal a little while ago. I never yet saw wounds heal in
the way they are doing on you. So you may sit up for dinner to-day, and
you may have whatever you want to eat."
"All right!" cried Tom, hastily scrambling out of bed. "My clamor is for
pork. How are you going to cook the pig boys?"
After a little consultation, it was decided to hang the shoat before the
great fire in the new fire place, and roast it whole.
"After all, it doesn't weigh more than forty pounds, and that isn't much
to divide between six of us," said Harry, laughingly.
"And besides," added Ed, "roast wild shoat is as good cold as hot, or
rather better. So we'll roast the gentleman whole, and I for one
volunteer to sit down before him and baste him so that all the juices
that belong to him shall be found succulently pervading his muscular
structure."
"I'll help in that," called Jim Chenowith from outside the cabin, where
he was just finishing a turn of guard duty.
Thus the little company rested and grew strong during the Sunday, and by
bed time they were eager for the morning and the hard, outdoor work of
tree felling that it would bring with it. With a great glowing blaze in
the fireplace, which each sentinel replenished with wood before
summoning his successor to take his place, the log hut seemed a
delightful place to sleep in.