"No, not exactly," said the Idiot. "Society has plenty of successors to Ward MacAllister. What they seem to me to need most is a P. T. Barnum. A man like that could make society a veritable Klondike, and with the Horse Show as a nucleus he wouldn't have much trouble getting the thing started along." XVII SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS "By Jingo!" said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at the breakfast-table the other morning, "but I'm just regularly tuckered out." "Late hours again?" asked the Lawyer. "Not a late hour," returned the Idiot. "Matter of fact, I went to bed last night at half-after seven and never waked until nine this morning. In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I'd been put through a threshing-machine. Every bone in my body from the funny to the medulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair of shoes on a school-boy in church, they are so stiff." "Oh well," said the Doctor, "what of it? The pace that kills is bound to have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution. If you, like other young men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle, what can you expect? You push nature into a corner and then growl like all possessed because she rebels." "Not I," retorted the Idiot. "Mr. Pedagog and the Poet and Mr. Bib may lead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing. I'm not striving after the unattainable. I'm not wasting my physical substance in riotous living. The cold and clammy touch of dissipation is not writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow. Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of the Subway to the other you won't find another man of my age who in general takes better care of himself. I am as watchful of my own needs as though I were a baby and my own nurse at one and the same time. No mother could watch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and--" "Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?" cried the Lawyer, irritated. "If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaiming yourself as a physical wreck? There must be some cause for your condition." "There is," said the Idiot, meekly. "I went Christmas shopping yesterday without having previously trained for it, and this is the result. I sometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public health more or less in your hands, don't take the initiative and stave off nervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run-down physical condition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying to cure it after the fact. The ounce-of-prevention idea ought to be incorporated, it seems to me, into the _materia medica_."