.83
Fish .81
Cucumbers .97
Beets .88
Apples .80
Meat .75

That was an eye-opener. I was getting less than 10 per cent. of
nourishment in nearly everything that I ate. Thus, I should be obliged to
eat nearly a hundred cucumbers and as many heads of cabbage to get one of
the real thing. I was afraid that I was imposing upon the good nature of
my stomach in asking it to digest so much water and debris in order to get
a little nutriment into my system. I thought it would be better to drink
the water as such and take my food in a more concentrated form. The body
being composed of proportionately so much more fluids than solids, I
concluded that plenty of pure water with a minimum quantity of food would
be worthy of trial. For a little while I drank water copiously, and each
day ate only an egg and a small piece of toast, with an occasional apple
or orange thrown in mainly to fill up.

When a new kind of food--a cereal product, it was supposed to be--appeared
on the market and was heralded as a great life-giver, I became one of its
faithful consumers. There were some fifteen or twenty of these and I had
eaten in succession nearly all of them--I mean my share of them. It read
on the boxes: "Get the habit; eat our food," and I was doing pretty well
at it until I met with a discouragement. One day I met a traveling man who
told me that in a town in Indiana where there was a breakfast-food
factory, hundreds of carloads of corn-cobs were shipped in annually and
converted into these tempting foods. My relish for this article of diet
left me instanter.

I partook of one kind of dietary for a while and then changed to something
so entirely different that my stomach began to rebel in earnest. My
appetite became very capricious. Sometimes I got up at one or two in the
morning and went to a night restaurant nearby and would try my hand, or
rather my stomach, on a full meal at this most unseasonable hour. Then at
times quite unseemly I would get such an insatiable appetite for onions,
peanuts, or something, that it was only appeased by hunting up the thing
desired. I began taking syrup of pepsin to artificially digest my food and
thus take some of the burden off my stomach. A friendly druggist took
sufficient interest in me to inform me that there was not enough pepsin in
the ordinary digestive syrups and elixirs to digest a mosquito's dinne