Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

trick advertised in dead earnest, not satirized, by the raucous shout of the brakeman at the half-way house—“_Five minutes for refreshments!_” Mr. Gladstone did not consider it undignified to give, as one secret of the sanity of body and mind prolonged through four-score years, his habit of chewing twenty times upon every morsel of meat taken into his mouth. The family physician who attended one of our great men—lately deceased—in his awfully brief final illness, said frankly that certain sharp attacks that had afflicted the statesman for several months before the cruel climax came, were caused by the habit of eating hurriedly such luncheons as he could snatch in the intervals of business. If the truth were told as bravely in thousands of other “mysterious visitations,” business men would be startled and enlightened—if not cured—of like practices. Dinner—the evening dinner in particular—gives the driven man a chance for his life. He sins against light and opportunity when he carries the bolting habit to the third meal. It may be vulgar to talk of chewing. Our very babies are taught to say “masticate,” instead. It is more vulgar not to do the thing itself. The cool indifference with which we admit the humiliating truth that our national digestion is chronically out of order, is more culpable even than the shiftless amiability with which we condone municipal and corporation murders. The individual citizen may well draw back from the task of fighting boards and millions. His digestive apparatus is his own, subject to no lien or disability except such as sloth and carelessness put upon it. If there be a self-evident fact in everyday hygiene it is that food swallowed without chewing, clogs and irritates the stomach. No other health law is so shamelessly and constantly transgressed by the human animal whose _habitat_ is the United States of America. The most stupid lout of a hostler knows that a horse must have time for chewing his oats, or he will go hungry; the scullion will tell you that, while chickens bolt whole corn and gobble down worms, the gizzard stands sentinel over