FAT IS ROLLING OFF.
ONE OF FASTING MEN LOSES 24
POUNDS AND THE OTHER 14.
Voices Are Getting Weak, but P. H.
Harlan and Cliff Hogan Are
Sticking to Abstinence ---
Cigarettes, Too.
"I've lost twenty-four pounds in just four days," announced P. H. Harlan, the fasting undertaker, as he stepped from the scales last night, and Cliff Hogan, who had a day and a half the start of me, has lost only fourteen pounds."
"It was a mistake to say I wasn't hungry up to yesterday, for I was, but that was my third day and with it my hunger really left me, as it did with Hogan and with Dr. I. J. Eales, the Bellville, Ill., physician, whose fourty day fast inspired us to start."
Dozens of telephone messages, picture postcards and letters are pouring in on the two fasting neighbors at Fifteenth and McGee streets. Tempting invitations to dine on spring chicken and inch-and-a-half sirloins tumble out of the mail along with serious inquiries from other fat men who are anxious to see the experiment kept up and who will themselves try it if found practical.
Clifford Hogan, who manages the Crescent Automobile Company, was not at his place of business until evening, for he had worked all day at moving his household goods from Mount Washington to Twelfth street and Wabash avenue. He found the unusually hard work on a very empty stomach did not exhaust him. But his voice was weak, and so was Harlan's, though the latter says his wind is better than it has been for years.
Harlan, whose hands and one leg have daily become puffed up, says that since the second day of his fast they have not swollen. He did a great deal of walking yesterday and is so delighted with the results that he may not stop short of the month limit set by Dr. Eales.
Harlan, too, has the title of doctor, having been a practicing dentist in Chicago and Wichita until the size of his belt became so great that he could not get near enough to his dental chair to reach the patients. Then he returned to the undertaking employment, where the patients are not so nervous, anyway.
When Harlan banteringly discusses with Hogan the length of their fast, the automobile man recounts that a week's fast was all he promised himself for sure, and after the first two days he really planned that all the money he saved on meals for the week he would spend for Sunday dinner in breaking the fast.
But he thinks he will probably stay with Harlan on a two or three weeks' fast. He is remembering now that while he was soldiering in the Philippines and ill he lived for five weeks on malted milk alone, and possibly he has visions of tapering off from actual fasting on such a diet, but his running mate stands firm for absolutely no nutriment.
"My second and third days," said Hogan, last night, "every time I passed a restaurant or smelled food, I had a sensation in my jaws as of having mumps. But that left when my hunger disappeared.
"I'm using the fast to break the cigarette habit, too, which was fastened on me. I have switched to cigars, which I could not enjoy before. I always inhaled cigarettes, and I know that if I did now it would make me sick. I suppose that proves that I'm getting down from abnormal to normal, and from depravity to healthfulness.
"Having been reared on a farm, I know that fat in a hog's body is merely the storage of nutriment for use in case a period comes in which no food is available. Then a hog can live off of his fat without injury or inconvenience. And so I see no reason why Harlan and I should not live to advantage for a time off our surplus supply."
