There is a very odd prejudice against pie as an article of diet.  It is common to hear every form of bodily degeneracy and infirmity attributed to this particular favorite food.  I see no reason or sense in it.  Mr. Emerson believed in pie, and was almost indignant when a fellow-traveller refused the slice he offered him.  “Why, Mr.________,” said be, “what is pie made for!” If every Green Mountain boy has not eaten a thousand times his weight in apple, pumpkin, squash, and mince pie, call me a dumpling.  And Colonel Ethan Allen was one of them,—­Ethan Allen, who, as they used to say, could wrench off the head of a wrought nail with his teeth.

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.  You know enough not to eat or drink what you have found does not agree with you.  You ought to know enough not to expose yourself needlessly to draughts.  If you take a “constitutional,” walk with the wind when you can, and take a closed car against it if you can get one.  Walking against the wind is one of the most dangerous kinds of exposure, if you are sensitive to cold.  But except a few simple rules such as I have just given, let your health take care of itself so long as it behaves decently.  If you want to be sure not to reach threescore and twenty, get a little box of homoeopathic pellets and a little book of homeopathic prescriptions.  I had a poor friend who fell into that way, and became at last a regular Hahnemaniac.  He left a box of his little jokers, which at last came into my hands.  The poor fellow had cultivated symptoms as other people cultivate roses or chrysanthemums.  What a luxury of choice his imagination presented to him!  When one watches for symptoms, every organ in the body is ready to put in its claim.  By and by a real illness attacked him, and the box of little pellets was shut up, to minister to his fancied evils no longer.

Let me tell you one thing.  I think if patients and physicians were in the habit of recognizing the fact I am going to mention, both would be gainers.  The law I refer to must be familiar to all observing physicians, and to all intelligent persons who have observed their own bodily and mental conditions.  This is the curve of health.  It is a mistake to suppose that the normal state of health is represented by a straight horizontal line.  Independently of the well-known causes which raise or depress the standard of vitality, there seems to be,—­I think I may venture to say there is,—­a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the vital force.  The “dynamo” which furnishes the working powers of consciousness and action has its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves, even its momentary ripples, in the current it furnishes.  There are greater and lesser curves in the movement of every day’s life,—­a series of ascending and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the very nature of the force at work in the living organism.  Thus we have our good seasons and our bad seasons, our good days and our bad days, life climbing and descending in long or short undulations, which I have called the curve of health.