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."