What do I say to smoking?  I cannot grudge an old man his pipe, but I think tobacco often does a good deal of harm to the health,—­to the eyes especially, to the nervous system generally, producing headache, palpitation, and trembling.  I myself gave it up many years ago.  Philosophically speaking, I think self-narcotization and self-alcoholization are rather ignoble substitutes for undisturbed self-consciousness and unfettered self-control.

Here is another of those brain-tapping letters, of similar character, which I have no objection to answering at my own time and in the place which best suits me.  As the questions must be supposed to be asked with a purely scientific and philanthropic purpose, it can make little difference when and where they are answered.  For myself, I prefer our own tea-table to the symposia to which I am often invited.  I do not quarrel with those who invite their friends to a banquet to which many strangers are expected to contribute.  It is a very easy and pleasant way of giving an entertainment at little cost and with no responsibility.  Somebody has been writing to me about “Oatmeal and Literature,” and somebody else wants to know whether I have found character influenced by diet; also whether, in my opinion, oatmeal is preferable to pie as an American national food.

In answer to these questions, I should say that I have my beliefs and prejudices; but if I were pressed hard for my proofs of their correctness, I should make but a poor show in the witness-box.  Most assuredly I do believe that body and mind are much influenced by the kind of food habitually depended upon.  I am persuaded that a too exclusively porcine diet gives a bristly character to the beard and hair, which is borrowed from the animal whose tissues these stiff-bearded compatriots of ours have too largely assimilated.  I can never stray among the village people of our windy capes without now and then coming upon a human being who looks as if he had been split, salted, and dried, like the salt-fish which has built up his arid organism.  If the body is modified by the food which nourishes it, the mind and character very certainly will be modified by it also.  We know enough of their close connection with each other to be sure of that, without any statistical observations to prove it.

Do you really want to know “whether oatmeal is preferable to pie as an American national food”?  I suppose the best answer I can give to your question is to tell you what is my own practice.  Oatmeal in the morning, as an architect lays a bed of concrete to form a base for his superstructure.  Pie when I can get it; that is, of the genuine sort, for I am not patriotic enough to think very highly of the article named after the Father of his Country, who was first in war, first in peace,—­not first in pies, according to my standard.