And this reminds me that a certain minister of my acquaintance has been teaching his Boy Scouts zone therapy methods, with especial reference to curing themselves of coughs and other common ailments. The boys also find it valuable in their “First Aid to the Injured” work. I can readily understand that the analgesic effects of zone pressure should be effective in the camp, as well as in the home, or in the dead-of-night emergency. Zone therapy opens up a tremendous field. So the more experimenters we have the sooner every one will know just how tremendous and useful and marvelous it is. CHAPTER XII. CURING A SICK VOICE. We all remember the gentleman in one of Moliere’s plays who was astounded to learn that he had been talking prose all his life. This verdant reminiscence has an almost universal application. For instance, Umberto Sorrentino, the gifted Italian tenor, has, for a number of years, relieved the “tight,” inflexible throat, which is the bane of vocalists and speakers, by grasping his tongue firmly in a handkerchief, pulling it as hard as could be comfortably borne, and wriggling it slowly from side to side. This, he says, eases up throat tension, and frees the voice. It also has a tendency to abort a beginning cold. He was led to adopt this practice from observing the beneficial effects of massage of the throat in stimulating and otherwise improving the circulation and releasing the muscles from the bound condition, which invariably (in his case) foreruns a cold. He reasoned that if external massage was beneficial, internal massage should be even more so; hence, the “wriggle.” Also, Miss Mabel Garrison, one of the new lyric sopranos of the Metropolitan Opera House, has won the appreciation and gratitude of various members of the company, by curing stiff, inelastic sore throats through pressures made upon the vocalists’ tongues. There is a hint in these significant facts that no singer, lawyer, actor, clergyman, mother of a family, or business man can afford to ignore. For almost everyone suffers occasionally from defects somewhere in the delicate mechanism that shapes air currents into beautiful sounds, and molds breath into speech. Although they probably are not aware of this, both Signor Sorrentino and Miss Garrison are employing zone therapy in relieving these vocal ills. For they are exerting pressures on the first and second zones, the region which governs the function of the vocal chords, the pharynx, larynx, and the respiratory passages. And while their results have been very remarkable, and eminently satisfactory to themselves and their fellow artists, they would be even more striking were the pressures made more “direct.” [Illustration: SIGNOR UMBERTO SORRENTINO,