"HOW SHALL WE DECIDE THIS QUESTION ? "

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 9, 16 December 1892, Page 31

" HOW SHALL WE DECIDE THIS QUESTION ? "

Now, nhiehUthe worse—to have no appetite for your dinner, or to have no dinner for your appetite ? There are lots of people on the one aide or tbe other of this question. When " good digestion waits on appetite and health on both,' that is the ideal attitude of a penon towards hii meals. But most of us are not blessed in this way ; we either have too much food without an appatite, or a vigorous appetite without enough to satisfy it. Different folk will answer this question differently, yet the common sense of it is that, within reasonable limits, it is better to have an appetite without a dinner, because, short of starvation line, a hungry man is a healthy man ; whereas a nun who ought to eat and doesn't feel like eating, stands in need of " alterations and repairs."

To illustrate. We rectntly received a communicatioh in which the writer says, " I was afraid to eat." Did be fancy his food was poisoned, or did his nature rebel against the nourishment lived on t If the latter, why f Let him clear the mystery himself. He says, •« In the year 1889 I changed my work from railway porter to signalman. I had beta tignalmau twelve months, and then all at once, to to apeak, I did not fed myself. My mouth tasted bad so that ordinary articles of diet seemed to lose their flavour ; the palate, to put it in that way, appeared to have nothing to say to them. One thing was like another, and none was good. My tongue was coated and furred, with a dark line down the middle and yellow far round it. My breath was offensive and my appetite poor, with pains through the chest and shoulders, which were always right before I bad eaten anything. Then I was greatly troubled with wind. It would gather so it felt like a ball in my throat, and act as if it would choke me."

We cannot wonder that under these circumstances our friend failed to do justice to his meals. He adds that there was what he calls " a prickling sensation " at his heart, as though it were touched with some sharp instrument. Tben, again, at times he was attacked with spasms, the agony of which was so severe that tba sweat rolled off him. " I dreaded." be says, tbe thought of eating, and many a scanty meal have Jmade,Jor I was afraid to eat.

'• After a time I got into a low, weak, and nervous condition, and felt miserable, as if something was going to happen, and this canaed iae to lose a good deal of sleep." What he means by the fear of " something going to happen " is, of course, the fear of some calamity, such as the loss of his position, his own death, or the death of somebody dear to him. This was due as he intimates, to the impoverished state of his blood (the life bearer), his unstrung nerves, and to the brain enfeebled by lack of nourishment. The night of this form of illness is always full of ghosts and goblins, the creatures of a restless and uogoverued imagination.

" With great difficulty," he says, « I stuck to my work, for I had a wife and family depending on me. So I struggled on, but what I suffered for over two years is past my powers of description. lam sure no one has suffered so much as 1 have done.

In the latter statement he is undoubtedly wrong. One's own pain is one's own, and is always harder to bear than iv one's notion of his neighbour's pain, There is a countless multitude who are all the while going through the same wretched experience, only we don't happen to come in touch with them. Well, the writer finally mentions that after all medical treatment had left him where it found him. He chanced to read in a book of a case exactly like his own having been cured by Mother Seigel's Syrup. " My wife," he says, "got me a bottle at Mr Laogstaff's, in Woodlesford, and after using its contents tbe ailment left me and has never returned since that fortunate day. I should like the whole world to know what it did for me. I have been employed by the Midland Railway Company for eleven years. (Signed) "Gkobob Hunt, " Car Bottom Boad, _ ... . IV . . „ „ Apperley Bridge, near Leeds." We publish this by Mr Hunt's desire, in order that part of the world at least may know how thankful he is and for what reason.