ing in the sea of trouble. I am sharply pulled up. "I
thought you would be too immersed in the wretched folly of agitation to
understand," she says; "I came to show you the better way." She is
followed by the clothes enthusiast. He wears sandals and has discarded
the abomination of starched linen. "We are forming a Society for the
Revival of Greek Clothing," he announces. "From the aesthetic and the
hygienic points of view, nothing is more important than the clothes we
wear." I venture on a feeble Teufelsdroeckh joke. He does not condescend
to listen. "We must get rid of hideous trousers and feet-strangling
skirts [I am lost in admiration over the indictment of the skirt, for I
remember a certain reception in Washington in the days of the
snake-skirt when I stumbled and fell at a moment when a little dignity
would have been my most precious possession]; we must wear loose white
draperies amenable to the air and the washtub." I quite agree, but raise
some practical obstacles and a few conventional pegs of delay. They
prove intolerable, and my visitor departs convinced that I am not one of
the elect.

Missionaries of dietetics come in a motley procession. There is the man
who believes we can eat anything provided we masticate everything with
bovine thoroughness; there is the man who believes that we ought to eat
nothing during long bouts of purgative fasting, and who lives cheerfully
and inexpensively on hot water during two yearly periods of twenty days.
There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and
ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which,
properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit
receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have
discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell
proliferation or hard water--there is always a complementary cure. I
listened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils of
salt. Salted food, I was told, is the cause of our troubles. We are
salted and dried until all power of recuperation is driven out of our
nerves and muscles. I was asked to study the subject. The theory was
well supported by scientific reasoning and evidence, and on the
following evening I had thoroughly entered into the saltless ideal. A
vision of the dispirited haddock had materially assisted my conclusion
when a visitor was announced. He was preceded by a card showing
impressively that he was a man of l