I not only noticed that my midday breakfast was a deliciously grateful meal, but that appetite became satisfied far short of the formally customary abnormal early morning gorge, and, what was more remarkable yet, I wanted nothing during the rest of the day, and not even until midnight, except, after vigorous exercise of some sort, I might desire a little fruit or a bit of bread or cracker; but never a full course dinner.
I wore a belt at my trousers, as was the custom of the place, and in a few days decreased the girth of my corpulency one hole in the belt; and before the summer was over, four holes, with only the most comfortable feeling accompanying the loss of weight.
When my family returned from Europe, I settled back into the American and English habit of a meat breakfast, because I did not want to be "different," and at the same time I half doubted but that my experience was nothing more than an abnormal one, attributable to the inertia of summer heat, literary absorption and lack of physical exercise.
Twice, when I have been left alone since then, away from the restraint of custom, and also in the midst of abundant athletic exercise, I have again cultivated the same habit of missing breakfast through desire to do early morning work, with the same splendid results.
The last time referred to is the present. My search for a lost waif through the framing of an appeal for him, has given me such absorbing thought that meals have been of no consideration beside it, and in the midst of it I find Dr. Dewey's book, the books of the English physicians indorsing him; and have secured results of health, comfort and strength to myself which I did not know I possessed; to corroborate my accidental experience. As I said before, this seems a very wide digression from the psychical to the physical, but it is really no digression at all, for it is in the service of the brain, and the brain is the direct agent of communication between the Creator and our consciousness, assisting us to work together in the Nature-Man partnership with useful efficiency.
Now, let me return to the aim of my address, and pursue the thread of my personal experience in search of the fundamental principles of True Living, which, to be proven, must be vouched for and tested by resultant happiness.
When I attacked the tap-roots of trouble and shut the door in the face of anger and worry for ever, I saw among the bones of their decomposition the skeleton of fear. It proved to be their backbone. Fear, then, was the support of all the deterrent passions that beset brightest manhood and womanhood and pursue it to an untimely death.
My book "Happiness" deals with the separation of fearthought from forethought in order to show that it is possible to smother a vital stimulant of energy with a resemblance of it which is as deadly a poison as carbonic acid gas.