_Mother_--"Well, find out what he is doing _and tell him to stop it this very minute_." By the way, I learned a few things in an experimental process about the great subject of alimentation. No matter much what we eat, the system appropriates what elements it wants. The taste bulbs were planted in our mouths for a useful purpose. Our taste is about the surest index to the body's requirements in the matter of nourishment. If our appetite calls for a thing and it tastes all right, it will do us good whether it be carbo-hydrate or hydro-carbon or something else. CHAPTER XI. TELLS OF A FEW NEW OCCUPATIONS AND VENTURES. Only casual mention has been made for a while concerning my occupations. The reader may imagine that in the pursuit of health I found no time to engage in the usual avocations of life. If such be your opinion I would say, be at once undeceived. The neurasthenic has the faculty of being able to turn off more work of a varied and useless character than any person living. I had a fund of information, mainly of a superficial nature, but it enabled me to turn my hand to a great many different things. I had once studied shorthand and I put this acquirement to what I thought was a useful purpose. I carried a number of note-books and took down everything that I saw or heard. Whenever a man of reputed wisdom was heard speaking, either from the rostrum or in private conversation, I was busy in the mechanical act of writing it down, and in so doing failed to get from the talk that inspiration which is so often more important than the mere words of the story. I had such a mess of notes in these little hooks and crooks that I never found time to hunt anything up and read it over. In fact, I doubt whether in all this rubbish I could have found anything I wanted had I searched ever so long. Still I obtained considerable information, mainly as I did when a boy, by absorption. I was full of tables and statistics. By keeping some of these in my brain in an easy place to get at them when wanted, I was able to formulate rules and plans for almost any condition that might arise. By unloading abstruse and unusual facts at the proper time and place I gained the reputation of being a very shrewd fellow, but I was always careful to introduce subjects in which my assertions were likely to go unchallenged. I had established the habit of reasoning by deduction and analogy, and would often startle people by what they thought was my profound wisdom. I had a system of cues by which I tried to cultivate a memory so tenacious that nothing could escape me, but this proved a great deal like my voluminous note-taking. It often crowded out some things of the most vital importance; besides, I often forgot my cues--just as one ties a string in his button-hole to keep from forgetting something and then forgets to look at the string.