thought was required to nourish me.  Before the week ended I felt fitter and sprier in every way than I had for years past; more alive, more interested in things, quicker on my feet and brisker in my mental processes than in a long time.  The chronic logy, foggy feeling in my head disappeared and failed to return.  I may add that to date it still has not returned.  Relieved of pressure against its valves—­at least I assume that was what came to pass—­my heart began functioning as I assume a normal heart should function, and at once the sense of oppression in the neighborhood of the heart was gone.

Within the same week I took most joyful note of the fact that I was losing flesh in the vicinities where mainly I craved to lose it amidships and at the throat.  I still had a double chin in front, but the third one, which I carried behind as a spare—­the one which ran all the way round my neck and lapped at the back like a clergyman’s collar—­was melting away.  And unless I was woefully mistaken, I no longer had to fight so desperate a battle with the waistband of my trousers when I dressed in the mornings.

I was not mistaken.  Glory be and likewise selah!  My first and second mezzanines were visibly shrinking.  By these signs and portents was I stimulated to continue the campaign so auspiciously launched and so satisfactorily progressing.

I shall not deny that in the second week I did some backsliding.  The swing of the tour carried me into the South.  It was the South in the splendor of the young springtime when the cardinal bird sang his mating song.  With brocading dandelions each pasture gloriously became even as the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and lo, the beginning of the strawberry shortcake season overlapped the last of the smoked-hog-jowl-and-turnip-greens period, and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land.

Figuratively, I was swept off my feet when a noble example of Southern womanhood put before my famished eyes the following items, to wit:  About half a bushel of newly picked turnip greens, rearing islandwise above a sloshing sea of pot licker and supporting upon their fronded crests the boiled but impressive countenance of a hickory-cured shote, the whole being garnished with paired-off poached eggs like the topaz eyes of beauteous blond virgins turned soulfully heavenward; and set off by flankings of small piping-hot corn pones made with meal and water and salt and shortening, as Providence intended a proper corn pone should be made.

Then the years rolled away like a scroll and once again was I back in the Kentucky foothills, a lean and lathy sprout of a kid, a limber six-foot length of perpendicular appetite; and it was twelve o’clock for some people, but it was dinner time for me!

My glad low gurgle of anticipatory joy smothered the small inner voice of caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young turnip greens.  So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode some more—­for behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.