He Tried It And Found It
Good, And Thereafter He Drank Only In That Fashion.
He noted that the squirrels lived on fruits and nuts.
He started on
a fruit-and-nut diet, helped out by bread, and he grew stronger and
put on weight. For three months he continued his primordial
existence in the brush, and then the heavy Oregon rains drove him
back to the habitations of men. Not in three months could a ninety-
pound survivor of two attacks of pneumonia develop sufficient
ruggedness to live through an Oregon winter in the open.
He had accomplished much, but he had been driven in. There was no
place to go but back to his father's house, and there, living in
close rooms with lungs that panted for all the air of the open sky,
he was brought down by a third attack of pneumonia. He grew weaker
even than before. In that tottering tabernacle of flesh, his brain
collapsed. He lay like a corpse, too weak to stand the fatigue of
speaking, too irritated and tired in his miserable brain to care to
listen to the speech of others. The only act of will of which he
was capable was to stick his fingers in his ears and resolutely to
refuse to hear a single word that was spoken to him. They sent for
the insanity experts. He was adjudged insane, and also the verdict
was given that he would not live a month.
By one such mental expert he was carted off to a sanatorium on Mt.
Tabor.
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