Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/147

Rh South for his health and located a small placer claim on the plateau of "Fort Mountain" in Murray County, Georgia. The mountain is a mile high—a cloud-capped outpost of the Southern Alleghanies, and the up-trip, with a few dozen eggs from the next valley farm, obliged the miner to stop every few minutes to keep his chest from bursting; but before the end of the year he was able to make the same trip, without a stop, with a bushel-bag full of cornmeal. The waste from the ravages of the tubercle microbes can perhaps never be repaired but the healthy tissue of the remaining portion of the lung is susceptible both of expansion and invigoration. The lungs expand and contract with the chest.

If three sisters marry on the same day—the first a ferryman, and learns to row a boat; the second a tailor and takes to tight lacing; the third a grocer and tends his shop, an autopsy would show that in twenty years after their separation the ferrywoman's lungs have grown fifty per cent, larger than the shopkeeper's and fully twice as large as the dressmaker's.

"Health is the chief of all earthly blessings," Lord Chesterfield writes to his son;" so much so, indeed, that a healthy beggar is happier than a