But how can we know what is good or bad for the body? The answer is, that our body itself will tell us. The body has a conscience as well as the soul. Put your hand into a potful of warm water, and your hand will at once let you know if the water is too hot. Go out sleigh-riding in a light straw hat on a cold winter morning, and your ears will soon ask for a warmer cover. After a laborer has been hard at work for eight or ten hours, his body will ask for rest. Make a child sit down in a chair without moving for six hours, and its body will ask for exercise. Our body soon lets us know if a coat or a shoe is too tight, or if a burden is too heavy. And it can just as certainly be relied upon to warn us against unwholesome food. It is true that we can silence that voice of our body’s conscience. After a man has swallowed a good many glasses of bad drink or smoked a cigar every morning for a couple of weeks, he at last gets “used to it,” as we call it; his nature gets changed, and at last he is unable to let such things alone. But at the first trial our sense of taste will plainly warn us against unwholesome food and drink. Before an apple is ripe it tastes sour. The taste of over-ripe or spoiled fruit gets more and more disagreeable. An Italian naturalist, during his travels in Southern Africa, noticed that a little pet monkey of his never made a mistake in choosing its food, and could tell poisonous herbs and berries from good ones the moment he tasted them. The traveler made that little creature his kitchen master, as he called it, and always let it try a bit of every kind of food that was offered to him for sale. “If Jocko ate a spoonful of honey and stretched out his hand for more,” he writes, “I was satisfied that it was worth buying; if the little chap grinned and flung the sample away, I felt sure that the bees must have gathered their honey from poisonous flowers. Jocko never made mistakes in such things, and that our own people blundered so often might be explained by the fact that we have blunted our sense of taste with strong drink and hot spices.” A boy who has been brought up on perfectly wholesome food can tell injurious things almost as quick as that little monkey. He will dislike the taste of sharp pepper sauces, of pickles, of strong cheese, of spoiled meat, and will not be apt to mistake a bitter swamp berry for a huckleberry.