enjoyable.

The afternoons were always in marked sluggishness by contrast, from the
taxing of digestion.

Without realizing that the heavy meals of the day were a tax upon the
brain, I would scarcely get away from the table before I began to feel
more generally tired out than the severest taxing from a long forenoon
of general activity ever made me. With the filled stomach, fatigue,
general exhaustion, came as a sudden attack rather than as an evolution
from labor, and there would be several hours of unfitness for doing any
kind of service well.

In the application of this method to others I had the great satisfaction
of good results without any exceptions; and the missionary work was
begun by friends among friends, fairly spreading better health and
adding thereby more and more disaster to my name.

More and more I became a focus of adverse criticism in all matters where
level-headedness was deemed important. My acute cases began to be
watched with hostile interest, as if homicide from starvation were the
inevitable result in all cases. My country had become the country of an
enemy.

Not being able to give my patients clearly defined reasons for the
general and local improvements resulting from a forenoon fast as a
method in hygiene, it had to be spread from relieved persons to
suffering friends; and according to the need, the sufferers from various
ailings would be willing to try anything new where efforts through the
family physician or patent medicines had completely failed; it was
spread as if by contagion, among the failures of the medical profession.

Among those to become interested at an early date was a prominent
minister who wore the title of D. D., and for a time his interest was
intense. He came to me one day with word that a member of his household,
well known to me as a young woman of unusual ability and culture, had
not been able to take solid food at his table for a year, and he
believed that my treatment would avail in her case. To this she was very
averse, since every treatment her hapless stomach had received had only
added to the debility, until disability had become the result. She
finally came to me to be relieved from the forceful importunity of her
reverend friend, who had excited my eager interest with a prophecy that
unusual literary distinction would follow a cure, as there were
abilities of the very highest order, in his estimation.

She came, and I had no difficulty in securing such