Warning to deep thinkers: your risibles need exercising as much as your plausibles. Besides, you'd look more attractive.

   This applies to health cranks also. Whenever you see the face of a health crank fall, by all means let it drop! Heaven knows he needs a new one.

   You say there's nothing to smile at? Oh, yes, there is. Listen. How to have a constant source of amusement; learn to laugh at yourself. Every human deserves to be laughed at about so much--if you do it for yourself, you relieve your neighbor of the necessity. And it's more comfortable for you.

   People won't follow a long face--a full moon looks more inviting than a hatchet. Reform fails because it frowns. It worships Duty instead of Desire. You have a perfect right to say, "Damn Duty!" Because to damn Duty is to deify Desire--at least it should be.

   My duty is what the other fellow thinks I should do because he wouldn't if he were I. I'd be a chump to do it. I don't like that word "chump;" it doesn't sound nice. But while we're talking of disagreeable things, we might as well bunch them.

   Back to Reform for a minute. Not more than a minute--the atmosphere is too malarial. Tammany wins and the Anti-Vice Society loses. Why? Truth never loses. Love never loses. God never loses. I'll tell you why. Because the presbyopic Parkhurstians have forgotten this cardinal principle: that whatever is natural is also delightful. They are a vestige of the austerities of the Dark Ages--something like the dodo or ichthyosaurus; if only they were as fast approaching extinction!

   Reform calls the people together with the exhorter's fire-bell of eternal torment; then struts vaingloriously in their front for two hours, proclaiming raucously that dismal doctrine of "Thou Shalt Not." Meanwhile Tammany has sought out the tenements that house but do not shelter the poor; has rapped softly on the door; has asked gently "How's your coal-bin to-day? Has the doctor been paid? We're to have a little celebration to-morrow, with popcorn and candy for the children; you will come, won't you?"

   Wise Tammany. Stupid Reform.

   Would you reach a man's soul? Feed his stomach, clothe his back, and warm his heart. Don't bother his brain--nothing is so dangerous for most men as to begin to think. Body and heart are one with soul, whereas brain is mostly an interloper. Tammany alternates the wisdom of God with the follies of Man--the Anti-Vicers manifest neither. Scant choice indeed. But what little there is goes to Tammany. Any Naturist will tell you eczema is easier to cure than anaemia.

   The reason the world won't be reformed is because it shouldn't be. It should be instructed--and inspired. But most of all smiled upon. The world wants Truth. The world does not want the errors, deficiencies and excesses of the professional exponents of Truth. Whenever you find a man complaining that people won't accept his message, you find a man whose message is incomplete.

   Do you like hurdy-gurdies?

   I do--they call the little children to dance on the sidewalk. I'd join them myself; only the stiff, sallow, wizened grown-ups preserving their dignity in the carbonic acid gas of a hermetically sealed house would think I was crazy and hurry the children in. Carbonic acid gas is a good preservative for dignity. When dignity has become fixed, we call it death.

   My, what a jump--from reform to hurdy-gurdy. Doesn't it feel fine to be out in the sunlight again? The play-spirit is irrepressible in the young of all animals. Watch a kitten, a lamb, a little squirrel, a healthy baby. Then observe an aggregation of the elite, sorted, starched and polished for a society function. No wonder they need monkeys for guests of honor--we always honor those wiser than ourselves.

   I remember how it was when I was a boy--it's all right to get over being a boy, provided you remain a child. I couldn't dig potatoes in the hot sun ten minutes without getting a raging headache. But I could outstay a four-hour stretch of tennis that same day, and still be chipper at the close. My family misjudged me--they called me "constitutionally tired." I wasn't lazy--I was only natural. Potatoes aren't natural; you don't have to dig berries off bushes or nuts off trees. Things God plants grow skyward. (Suppose a small boy should see this, about ten o'clock in the morning, with company coming for dinner, and no potatoes dug! But you can't get at me, you poor flurried mother--because you haven't my address. Still I'm a little scared--I was once in the boy's trousers. What a wonderful thing memory is! [Or maybe it's only imagination. Because you mustn't infer that the parental discipline of manual juxtaposition prevailed in our family. My parents were always most lenient with my abnormalities and tolerant of my digressions.]) Speaking of youth, I know some people who hope to live exactly one hundred years. They have formed a Club for that purpose. I went to one of their meetings. I didn't go again--I don't like funerals. They were merely holding a wake over their own defunct hearts. What's the use? Spectres aren't supposed to die anyway. A tortoise lives a hundred years; who wants a tortoise for a bed-fellow?

   We haven't lost sight of the Conquest Fast--we're just viewing the surrounding scenery.

   You read in the annals of the church how many weeks a certain saint fasted. And you image to yourself a lugubrious visage, with cadaverous cheeks, compressed lips, aquiline features, furrowed brow, haunted eyes, pallid flesh; and the whole grim calamity surmounted by a thick black cowl.

   Now that isn't my picture at all.

   I smile more than I frown. No cowl ever made could abash my hair--it's a cross between Elbert Hubbard's and Paderewski's. And my lips are the kind to kiss with. Baby-kisses, you stupid man. If you always had baby-kisses in your mouth, your sweetheart would have some other kind in hers. But since you don't know anything about baby-kisses, and they are the most needed, she has to supply them all.

   I don't like these personalities any more than you do. But they prove I am human. Whereas most of the souls that have distanced Humanity have also forgotten the way back.

   Asceticism and sensualism are equally unnatural. The ascetic would refine his body. He is right. The sensualist would enjoy his body. Also right. But each makes the mistake of being anti-the-other. Don't be anti-anything, be simply non. Sooner or later every knocker pounds his own thumb.

   Pain is the penalty for forcing pleasure; death is the penalty for denying it. To enjoy life is to use naturally every natural function of life; not to think too much or to feel too little. Happiness is the unsought crown bestowed on self-fidelity. And it rests so light we never know it's there.

   To eat for pleasure is to eat for pain; but to eat without pleasure is to eat without life. Soul suffers most when body seeks enjoyment for itself. Indeed the only sense-pleasures that cause regret are those which the soul failed to feel first. In short, soul-hunger can never be surfeited; and all hunger should be soul-hunger.

   Here is a sure remedy for indigestion : eat a very little of whatever you love best, and enjoy it to the utmost. No one ever loved too much; even excess of passion is lack of Love.

   Work for the joy of working, play for the joy of playing, cat for the joy of eating--and fast for the joy of fasting.

   I have been asked "How, in the name of all that is mystical, can you fast for enjoyment?" Well, a materialist can't. But a materialist won't ever undertake a Conquest Fast. So such are eliminated. Only he will enjoy the Fast who can enjoy both soul and sense.

   Let me give you the secret of enjoyment in six words: minimum of real, maximum of ideal. Nothing that we have sublimized can satiate us. It satisfies--but stops there. Let Deity invest the mortal, and the mortal blossoms into immortality. To sense the sweetness of a flower, look within its heart--not upon the dumb clay that clots its external.

   If you fail to enjoy life, it is because you are living on the surface. And even the Almighty is often incompetent to smoothe the surface of things. Your blood is sluggish, your organs are clogged, your nerves are deadened, your brain is confused, your heart is chilled, your senses are numb; your soul is stifling.

   During the Conquest Fast, you should be happier everywhere save in two small patches of your anatomy--your palate and your brain. But they don't deserve to be happy--they have been insubordinate too long. After the first week or so, discomfort vanishes here also.

   It might be well to state that during the first week of the Fast, the enjoyment of your friends and neighbors will not be particularly enhanced. They'll make it worse for you and you for them. By referring to the Twenty Rules however, you will see a way around this omen.

   We are told by our friends the metaphysicians that Happiness is Harmony. If that be so, you will find yourself growing supremely happy toward the close of a two-weeks', three-weeks', or four-weeks' Fast. Every fibre of your body will be attuned to Nature, every quiver of your soul made seraphic with its melody of Truth. That long-lost child-sensibility will steal over you once more, a child being proverbially happy because its soul is fed on the finer forces of earth and air and ether; forces cut off from men by their grosser environs of civilization.

   Is this kind of enjoyment too mystical?

   All right, we'll have some that isn't. You should have seen me eat at the close of my Thirty-Day Fast! Delight--rapture--ecstacy--transport--bliss--all beggarly words to describe the sensation.

   Just between me and you--I'll have to whisper it, for I wouldn't have anybody else hear for the world;--but if I were a rank materialist, caring nothing about soul, I should fast awhile just for the fun of eating when hungry. I recall how a College Professor used to do that--he taught in the University that made a lumber-room out of me. He was a "D.D." too--D.D. standing for "Death's Deputy." Thanksgiving morning he used to stay home from church so as to play tennis and get a whaling appetite for Turkey. He had boils to pay for it, so he did. I'm not blaming this particular Professor--indeed he was broader and saner than the majority. It's something for a classicist to appreciate the value of an appetite--if he did go at it wrong.

   Fasting--then feasting.

   That's my doctrine.

   Cream once a week instead of milk-and-water every day. Some folks can't digest cream. But I have a shy suspicion it's because they won't fast. They'd rather be half-way comfortable in their bodies than altogether sane in their souls. Of course they're anaemic--even a baby sickens on watered milk. Don't try to wean them. When they're grown enough, Nature will send them foraging for themselves.

   Happiness is like a rare species of butterfly--seldom caught and sure to die in captivity. But if you are very, very still, it may alight near you; where you can revel in the golden lustre of its wings, the subtle poise of its body, the matchless grace of its flight.

   And then good-bye. Good-bye.