t is
beautiful is the one the man has long been preparing for by living a
beautiful life. Every one of us are right now preparing for old age.

There may be a substitute somewhere in the world for Good Nature, but I
do not know where it can be found.

The secret of salvation is this: Keep Sweet.

An Alliance with Nature

My father is a doctor who has practised medicine for sixty-five years,
and is still practising.

I am a doctor myself.

I am fifty years old; my father is eighty-five. We live in the same
house, and daily we ride horseback together or tramp thru the fields and
woods. To-day we did our little jaunt of five miles and back
'cross country.

I have never been ill a day--never consulted a physician in a
professional way, and in fact, never missed a meal through inability to
eat. As for the author of the author of _A Message to Garcia_, he holds,
esoterically, to the idea that the hot pedaluvia and small doses of hop
tea will cure most ailments that are curable, and so far all of his own
ails have been curable--a point he can prove.

The value of the pedaluvia lies in the fact that it tends to equalize
circulation, not to mention the little matter of sanitation; and the
efficacy of the hops lies largely in the fact that they are bitter and
disagreeable to take.

Both of these prescriptions give the patient the soothing thought that
something is being done for him, and at the very worst can never do him
serious harm.

My father and I are not fully agreed on all of life's themes, so
existence for us never resolves itself into a dull, neutral gray. He is
a Baptist and I am a Vegetarian. Occasionally he refers to me as
"callow," and we have daily resorts to logic to prove prejudices, and
history is searched to bolster the preconceived, but on the following
important points we stand together, solid as one man:

First. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred who go to a physician have no
organic disease, but are merely suffering from some symptom of their own
indiscretion.

Second. Individuals who have diseases, nine times out of ten, are
suffering only from the accumulated evil effects of medication.

Third. Hence we get the proposition: Most diseases are the result of
medication which has been prescribed to relieve and take away a
beneficent and warning symptom on the part of wise Nature.

Most of the work of doctors in the past has been to prescribe for
symptoms; the difference between actual d