hospital and having the stub-end of your self-respect removed. An aching tooth or a tooth of which you are conscious draws mightily on your mental reserve. Morphine, or a dab of cotton soaked in chloroform, will help you forget it, but these things are drafts on the bank of futurity and the loan must be met with usurious interest. ¶ I once knew a playwright who started in to write a great historical drama; but he got a toothache, and decided to make it a farce-comedy; but all he produced was a fizzle ❦ Seldom does a man with the toothache make good; and to have cavities in your teeth and not know it is worse than to have the toothache, since pain is Nature’s beneficent warning ❦ So, to have decayed teeth and never have a toothache would mean lack of sensibility, which is lack of life. Such a one hasn’t enough nerves to make him irritable, much less to give him artistic grouch ❦ And grouch is unused or misused energy—and have I not said that all energy is divine? You write your poem, your essay, your play—just as you paint your picture, carve your statue, or give your oration—out of your surplus, and never out of your capital ❦ Should you begin to draw on your capital you get nerv. pros. or fatty degeneration of the cerebrum, and are a candidate for Billy Muldoon’s. ¶ Is oratory a matter of toothsomeness? Most certainly, yes ❦ The greatest orator that New York ever produced was thrown from his artistic hobbyhorse once and forever, when his store-teeth, in an impassioned moment, shot over the footlights and fell with a sickening thud into the orchestra. “Say, mister, are these your teeth?” asked a man in a front seat, as he solemnly arose and handed up the grinders. And that broke up the meeting ❦ I once saw a man, singing the part of Tannhauser, do a similar stunt. And we all declared that he could go down to Venusburg and stay there, for all of us—he ceased to be interesting. ¶ Get this down as an axiom: To speak well, or sing well, you must have good teeth ❦ The teeth are organs of speech—auxiliary organs at least. When your voice whistles through your teeth, and the tones come wheezy and with a sort of sad surprise, there are soon bubbles in your think-tank, and you travel home on your rim. It is then time to sing Tosti’s _Good-by_, and retire from the stage, thereafter warbling only to the gallery of your psychic self ❦ [Illustration] The Health Habit