James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[150] therefore indigestible food. A simple message, and one most obviously true. The wonder is, not that he should have obtained followers, but that there should have been found one human being so besottedly ignorant and so incapable of being instructed as to deny the truth of his leading principles. Graham was a remarkable man. He was one of those whom nature has gifted with the power of taking an interest in human welfare. He was a discoverer of the facts, that most of us are sick, and that none of us need be; that disease is impious and disgraceful, the result, in almost every instance, of folly or crime. He exonerated God from the aspersions cast upon his wisdom and goodness by those who attribute disease to his ‘mysterious dispensations,’ and laid all the blame and shame of the ills that flesh endures at the door of those who endure them. Graham was one of the two or three men to whom this nation might, with some propriety, erect a monument. Some day, perhaps, a man will take the trouble to read Graham's two tough and wordy volumes, and present the substance of them to the public in a form which will not repel, but win the reader to perusal and conviction.

Horace Greeley, like every other thinking person that heard Dr. Graham lecture, was convinced that upon the whole he was right. He abandoned the use of stimulants, and took care in selecting his food, to see that there was the proper proportion between its bulk and its nutriment; i. e. he ate Graham bread, little meat, and plenty of rice, Indian meal, vegetables and fruit. He went, after a time, to board at the Graham house, a hotel conducted, as its name imported, on Graham principles, the rules and regulations having been written by Dr. Graham himself. The first time our friend appeared at the table of the Graham House, a silly woman who lived there tried her small wit upon him.

‘It's lucky,’ said she to the landlady, ‘that you've no cat in the house.’

‘Why?’ asked the landlady.

‘Because,’ was the killing reply, ‘if you had, the cat would certainly take that man with the white head for a gosling, and fly at him.’

Gentlemen who boarded with him at the Graham House, remember him as a Portentious Anomaly, one who, on ordinary occasions,