s of life
through an intelligent understanding and application of the physiology
of cheer as the chief force in the life of the body, mind, and soul.

VIII.

Having finally arrived at the conviction that from the first wink in the
morning until the last at night strength departs, not in any way to be
kept up by food, that from the last wink at night until the first in the
morning strength returns, I became fully endowed to tell all the sick
and afflicted in the most forceful way that with the strength of the
brain recharged by sleep is all the labor of the day performed, and that
no labor is so taxing upon human muscles that it cannot be performed
longer without fatigue when the breakfast is omitted.

That this is possible came to me as a great surprise and in this way: a
farmer with a large assortment of ailments came to me for relief through
drugs. He was simply advised to take coffee mornings, rest mainly during
forenoons, and when a normal appetite and power to digest would come he
would be able to work after resuming his breakfasts. This man, who was
more than fifty years old, was the first manual laborer to be advised to
observe a morning fast.

Several months after, he came to me with news that his ailing had all
departed, and that he had been able to do harder work on his coffee
breakfasts than ever before with breakfasts of solids. And if he so
worked with power during forenoons, why not others? Why not all?

This no-breakfast plan was so contagious that I was not long in finding
that farmers in all directions were beginning to go to their labors with
much less food in their stomachs than had been their wont, and in all
cases with added power of muscle.

Only recently three farmers went into the field one hot morning to
cradle oats, the most trying of all work on the farm; two of them had
their stomachs well filled with hearty foods. With profuse sweating and
water by the quart because of the chemical heat arising from both
digestion and decomposition, these toiled through the long hours with
much weariness. The third man had all his strength for the swinging of
the cradle, the empty stomach not even calling for water; with the
greatest ease he kept his laboring friends in close company and when the
noon hour came he was not nearly so tired as they.

A man who had been a great sufferer from indigestion, a farmer, found
such an increase of health and strength from omitting the morning meal
that h