before the victim is forty years old. She
does not often annoy a man with her drink bill until he is past his
prime, and then presents it in the form of Bright's disease, fatty
degeneration of the heart, drunkard's liver, or some similar disease.
What you pay the saloon keeper is but a small part of your score.

We often hear it said that the age of miracles is past. We marvel that
a thief dying on the cross should appear that very day in Paradise; but
behold how that bit of meat or vegetable on a Hawarden breakfast table
is snatched from Death, transformed into thought, and on the following
night shakes Parliament in the magnetism and oratory of a Gladstone.
The age of miracles past, when three times a day right before our eyes
Nature performs miracles greater even than raising the dead? Watch
that crust of bread thrown into a cell in Bedford Jail and devoured by
a poor, hungry tinker; cut, crushed, ground, driven by muscles,
dissolved by acids and alkalies; absorbed and hurled into the
mysterious red river of life. Scores of little factories along this
strange stream, waiting for this crust, transmute it as it passes, as
if by magic, here into a bone cell, there into gastric juice, here into
bile, there into a nerve cell, yonder into a brain cell. We can not
trace the processes by which this crust arrives at the muscle and acts,
arrives at the brain and thinks. We can not see the manipulating hand
which throws back and forth the shuttle which weaves Bunyan's
destinies, nor can we trace the subtle alchemy which transforms this
prison crust into the finest allegory in the world, the Pilgrim's
Progress. But we do know that, unless we supply food when the stomach
begs and clamors, brain and muscle can not continue to act; and we also
know that unless the food is properly chosen, unless we eat it
properly, unless we maintain good digestion by exercise of mind and
body, it will not produce the speeches of a Gladstone or the allegories
of a Bunyan.

Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Imagine a cistern which
would transform the foul sewage of a city into pure drinking water in a
second's time, as the black venous blood, foul with the ashes of
burned-up brain cells and debris of worn-out tissues, is transformed in
the lungs, at every breath, into pure, bright, red blood. Each drop of
blood from that magic stream of liquid life was compounded by a divine
Chemist. In it float all our success and destiny. I