322 EARLY REMINISCENCES furnished with another stomach in the brain, inelastic and inex-pansive, yet capable of containing a prodigious amount of nutriment, packed small and neatly, like a sailor's chest. As we enjoy an intellectual life as well as one that is animal, the brain is the organ for acquisition of nutriment. We feed this stomach in the upper story with verbal instruction, reading, observation and conversation ; and the digestive act is Thought over our crude acquisitions. This is Stomach No. z. There is not much risk of our hunger-striking with regard to this superior stomach, but there does exist a liability of our consuming material without discrimination as to its nutritive qualities. A percentage of human beings is disposed to nibble promiscuously, and lose appetite for wholesome food, as Americans chew gum, English girls crunch chocolates, and Germans are given to Marzipan naschen. A good many men in the country never read anything save the daily paper, and some only the sporting intelligence in that. A certain number of both sexes read nothing at all, and observe nothing deserving of consideration. What can be the result in such cases, in the ladies' boudoir, in the smoking-room of the gentlemen's club, or that of the surburban villa, of the Vicarage in Sleepyhollow, of that in the manor-house of Bob Acres, Esquire ? We are told that a man who is starving, whether unintentionally or as a hunger-striker, being unfurnished from outside with nutriment eats himself; that is to say, the gastric juice attacks whatever it can reach, the coats of the stomach, the flesh, the fat, and wastes the man to an anatomy. During the period when I was a boy, this was much the case with residents in the country, lay and clerical. It is true that we had a book club, of which my uncle was secretary ; but, although the volumes circulated, and I presume were read, they passed through the brains undigested —as far as I could judge by after-dinner and occasional conversation—as some sorts of food travel through the alimentary canal, having contributed no nourishment to the system, undigested, without having furnished thoughts to the brain. It was this that drove my father first from Bratton and then from Lew ; parsons and squires alike were voluntary hunger-strikers as far as intellect went, and were feeding upon their own tallow, and poor tallow he considered it to be.
