I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do, carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and I was not. But I can say this--if I had eaten his breakfast at the start of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word "dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch, which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion. There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric juice for any reason be lacking--because your nervous energy has gone somewhere else, or because your blood-stream, from which the gastric juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor; then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons. In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.