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.