When it becomes generally known, as it some day will be, that
overeating and wrong-eating are the prime causes of temptation to
intemperance in drinking, the measure of Dr. Dewey's service to the
Temperance Cause will be better appreciated.
AN AGREEABLE ENDURANCE TEST
After this volume was published in 1898, the field of experiment was
changed from the United States to Europe. The physical exercise and
mental recreation of the summer of 1899 consisted partly of bicycling.
We landed in Holland, toured Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, and
reached Paris in the course of about two months and with upwards of
five hundred miles' wheeling. For another month we bicycled leisurely
around Paris and added two or three hundred miles to our cyclometer
record. During the month of July the author further rode some seven
hundred miles in and about the Forest of Fontainebleau.
The idea of an endurance-test was suggested to the author by the ease
with which he accomplished a century of miles on the Fourth of July,
1899. Being in Paris, and wishing to celebrate a most beautiful summer
day and our National Holiday at the same time, an early start was made
and the beauty of the day, the charm of the golden harvest fields lying
between Paris and the Forest of Fontainebleau, and the noble forest
itself, led us on and on until the cyclometer showed a distance, for
the forenoon run, of slightly more than eighty kilometers (fifty miles)
in a straight-away line from hotel and home in Paris. Two years before,
fifty miles on bicycle, even when accustomed to riding daily during the
craze for bicycling, which was then at its zenith, if done in one day,
would have completely "done the author up" and would have called for
several days of rest for recuperation. In the present case, however, no
fatigue had yet been experienced and the day was still young.
The forest studio-home of friend Redfield, the Philadelphia
landscapist, was found on the edge of the forest bordering the Seine
at Brolles, and we went for a spin together and finally returned awheel
to Paris. To make a "century run" in a day had always seemed to the
author a feat for athletes and experts only, and when he found that
he had made it without any inconvenience and was in no way painfully
conscious of it next day, the ambition to see _what really could be
done_ was born. It would give practical measure of the improvement
due to an economical nutrition. It was known what the newly ambitious
contestant for a record _could not do_ two years before, but it was
now uncertain what he _might be able to do_ under changed condition of
health even with two years' additional handicap of age; besides, it
happened to be the half-century year of the author's life and a good
time to jot down a record of a new start in life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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