Part 67

“Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you. They’re to tell you whether the little things of life are right with you.”

“And if they’re not?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Why, then you’re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there’s something wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of vitality, and when you let down your body’s vitality you’re simply saying to any germ that may happen along, ‘Come right in and make yourself at home.’

“Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked Grandma Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren’t caught in a draft. Well, they’re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now, what is a draft? Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we thoroughly know, it’s this: that moving air is infinitely better for us than still air. Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion, seems to purify itself and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of a draft is that it may mean a sudden change of the body’s temperature. Nobody thinks that wind is unhealthful, because when you’re out in the wind—which is the biggest and freest kind of a draft—you’re prepared for it. If not, your nerves say to you, ‘Move faster; get warm.’ It’s the same indoors. If the draft chills you, your nerves will tell you so. Therefore, mind your nerves. Otherwise, you’ll become specially receptive to the coryza germ and when you’ve caught that, you’ll have caught cold.”

“I wish,” remarked Mr. Clyde, “that my nerves would tell me why I feel so logy every morning. They don’t say anything definite. It isn’t indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert after breakfast, as if my stomach hadn’t any enthusiasm in its job.”

“Breakfast is the only meal I don’t have with you, so I don’t know,” replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser. “But I should say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.”

“How could that be?” said Mrs. Clyde. “Tom has the simplest kind of breakfast, and it’s the same every day.”

“Well, there you are.” The Health Master’s tone assumed that the solution was found.

“Where are we?” queried Mr. Clyde. “I’m up in the air!”

“What is this remarkably regular breakfast?”

“Eggs, rolls, and coffee.”

“Oh! Eggs every morning?”

“Two of them. Medium boiled.”

“Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months—”

“No. That’s my winter breakfast only.”

“Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor stomach gets bored.”

“What’s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?” inquired Manny. “They let us have ‘em, in training.”

“Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come to two hundred, there’s something very obvious the matter—monotony. Your stomach is a machine, it’s true, but it’s a human machine. It demands variety.”

“Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to pie.”

“A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.”

“He eats an awful lot of meat,” observed Julia, who was a somewhat fastidious young lady. “My Sunday-school teacher calls meat-eaters human tigers.”

“Oh, that’s too easy a generalization, Junkum,” replied the Health Master. “With equal logic she could say that vegetable-eaters are human cows.”

“But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!” stated Grandma Sharpless. “If meat weren’t good for us, we wouldn’t have been eating it all these generations.”

“True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly in the warm months. But in winter it’s practically a necessity.”

“Some of the big athletes say they’re vegetarians,” said Manny.

“There are individual cases,” admitted the Health Master; “but in the long run it doesn’t work. A vegetarian race is, generally speaking, small of stature and build, and less efficient than a meat-eating race. The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of it, and a good variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don’t overload it, don’t understock it, and don’t let it get bored.”

For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic advance upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she captured his knee and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby hand under his chin.