Edwin Booth used to be troubled very much with indigestion; he suffered keenly from it.  One day he went to dine with some intimate friends, and before the dinner began his hostess said with a very smiling face:  “Now, Mr. Booth, I have been especially careful with this dinner not to have one thing that you cannot digest.”

The host echoed her with a hearty “Yes, Mr. Booth, everything that will come to the table is good for your digestion.”

The words made a very happy impression on Mr. Booth.  First there was the kind, sympathetic friendliness of his hosts; and then the strong suggestion they had given him that their food would agree with him.  Then there was very happy and interesting talk during the whole time that they were at table and afterward.  Mr..  Booth ate a hearty dinner and, true to the words of his host and hostess, not one single thing disagreed with him.  And yet at that dinner, although care had been taken to have it wholesome, there were served things that under other conditions would have disagreed.

While we should aim always to eat wholesome food, it is really not so much the food which makes the trouble as the attitude we take toward it and the way we test it.

All the contractions which are made by our fussing about food interfere with our circulation; the interference with our circulation makes us liable to take cold, and it is safe to say that more than half the colds that women have are caused principally by wrong eating.  Somewhat akin to grandmother’s looking for her spectacles when all the time they are pushed to the top of her head is the way women fuss about their eating and then wonder why it is that they cannot seem to stand drafts.

There is no doubt but that our food should be thoroughly masticated before it goes into our stomachs.  There is no doubt but that the first process of digestion should be in our mouths.  The relish which we get for our food by masticating it properly is greater and also helps toward digesting it truly.  All this cannot be over-emphasized if it is taken in the right way.  But there is an extreme which perhaps has not been thought of and for which happily I have an example that will illustrate what I want to prove.  I know a woman who was, so to speak, daft on the subject of health.  She attended to all points of health with such minute detail that she seemed to have lost all idea of why we should be healthy.  One of her ways of over-emphasizing the road to health was a very careful mastication of her food.  She chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed, and the result was that she so strained her stomach with her chewing that she brought on severe indigestion, simply as a result of an overactive effort toward digestion.  This was certainly a case of “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, and falls on the other.”  And it was not unique.