People occasionally ask me if I have any hobby that has helped me ward off the attacks of worry.  I do not believe I have ever answered this question as fully as I might have done, so I will attempt to do so now.  One of my first hobbies was food reform and hygienic living.  When I was little more than twelve years of age I became a vegetarian and for nine years lived the life pretty rigorously.  I have always believed that simpler, plainer living than most of us indulge in, more open air life, sleeping, working, living out of doors, more active, physical exercise of a useful character, would be beneficial.  Then I became a student of memory culture.  Professor William Stokes of the Royal Polytechnic Institution became my friend, and for years I studied his system of Mnemonics, or as it was generally termed “Artificial Memory.”  Then I taught it for a number of years, and evolved from it certain fundamental principles upon which I have largely based the cultivation of my own memory and mentality, and for which I can never be sufficiently thankful.  Then I desired to be a public speaker.  I became a “hobbyist” on pronunciation, enunciation, purity of voice, phrasing and getting the thought of my own mind in the best and quickest possible way into the minds of others.  For years I kept a small book in which I jotted down every word, its derivation and full meaning with which I was not familiar.  I studied clear enunciation by the hour; indeed as I walked through the streets I recited to myself, aloud, so that I could hear my own enunciation, such poems as Southey’s Cataract of Lodore, where almost every word terminates in “ing.”  For I had heard many great English and American speakers whose failure to pronounce this terminal “ing” in such words as coming, going, etc., used to distress me considerably.  Other exercises were the catches, such as “Peter Piper picks a peck of pickled peppers,” or “Selina Seamstich stitches seven seams slowly, surely, serenely and slovenly,” or “Around a rugged rock a ragged rascal ran a rural race.”  Then, too, Professor Stokes had composed a wonderful yarn about the memory, entitled “My M-made memory medley, mentioning memory’s most marvelous manifestations.”  This took up as much as three or four pages of this book, every word beginning with m.  It was a marvelous exercise for lingual development.  He also had “The Far-Famed Fairy Tale of Fenella,” and these were constantly and continuously recited, with scrupulous care as to enunciation.  My father was an old-time conductor of choral and oratorio societies, and was the leader of a large choir.  I had a good alto voice and under his wise dicipline it was cultivated, and I was a certificated reader of music at sight before I was ten years old.  Then I taught myself to play the organ, and before I was twenty I was the organist and choir-master of one of the largest Congregational churches of my native town, having often helped my father in the past years to