The insistent desire to have a certain degree and character of appetite not infrequently leads to consulting the physician. Still more common is the obsession that the appetite must be gratified, the supposition being that the desire for food is, in the growing child or in the adult, an infallible guide to the amount needed, though it is a matter of common knowledge that this is not true of infants or of domestic animals. If one leaves the table hungry he soon forgets it unless inordinately self-centered, and he has no more desire to return than to go back to bed and finish the nap so reluctantly discontinued in the morning. I have heard the theory advanced by an anxious forecaster of future ills, that all unnecessary food, if packed away as adipose tissue, serves to nourish the body in periods of starvation. Assuming that the average individual need consider this stress of circumstance, I am strongly of the impression that the best preparation for enforced abstinence will prove, not a layer of fat, but the habit of abstinence. The nursery poet says: "The worry cow would have lived till now If she'd only saved her breath. She feared the hay wouldn't last all day So choked herself to death." The quantity of food proved by experiment to suffice for the best work, physical or mental, is surprisingly small. A feeling of emptiness, even, is better preparation for active exercise than one of satiety. It is a national obsession with us that no meal is complete without meat. Order fruit, a cereal, rolls and coffee, at the hotel some morning, and the chances are ten to one that the waiter will ask what you are going to have for _breakfast_, though you have already ordered more than is absolutely necessary for that meal, as demonstrated by the custom upon the Continent, where the sense of fitness is as much violated by the consumption of an enormous breakfast as it is with us by the omission of a single detail. It may be asked if it is not subversive of discipline for the hotel _habitué_ to become too easy-going. There is doubtless a limit to the virtue of allowing ourselves to be imposed upon, but there is little fear that the individual who opens the question will err in this direction. It behooves him rather to consider the danger of his occupying the unenviable position of the "fuss-budget." XIV. THE FEAR OF BECOMING INSANE We must be steadfast, Julian! Satan is very busy in all of us. IBSEN: _Emperor and Galilean_. Few, perhaps, among the high-strung and delicately organized can truly say that this fear has never occurred to them. It affects even children, at an age when their minds are supposed to be taken up with the pleasures and pursuits appropriate to their years. This fear is generally dispelled by the serious occupations of life, but in certain cases it persists as an insistent and compelling thought.