Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/124

118 as rigorous as that of Western Canada. They lived in tents, most of them, and passed the days hunting and snow-shoveling, and the nights comfortably enough under twenty woolen blankets, if a dozen were not sufficent, and all faithfully following Dr. Dio Lewis' plan of giving the ice-cold and ice-pure highland air a chance to expurgate their microbe-ridden lungs. Invalids who would have coughed away their lives in a tropical swamp-resort recovered in these cloudland camps—not men only but women and feeble children. It has, indeed, often been observed that the moral effect of protracted confinement in a hospital is not favorable to the chances of recovery, and, moreover, a private establishment lessens the danger of contagion. And in the highlands of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Northern Georgia land and labor are so cheap that even people of moderate means can build a sanitarium of their own.

A log house can be made as airy as any tent, and is out and out more comfortable. A rough-hewed porch-roof, projecting like the veranda of a Swiss chalet, will keep the cabin both dry and airy, square holes in the center of each wall can serve as windows in fine weather, and during a