Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/71

Rh better excitement at the gravel-bar. They would hardly take time to eat their meals. The successful ones, especially, merely nibbled a crust and hurried back to work. After a cat-nap or two, they left their hammocks and opened the window-shutters as if they could hardly await the dawn of the morning. "Get up, boys, here's daylight at last," one of them would call out in the middle of the night; then, after scrutenizing the signs of the sky more closely: "Blame the luck, it's only the moon, after all."

It is, therefore,, a good plan to reserve a specially diverting job of work for the term of a fasting-cure, but it should be remembered that severe physical efforts tend to complicate the demands upon the reserve energies of the organism. Tree-felling while fasting would be burning the candle of life at both ends. For similar reasons cold weather is apt to aggravate the ordeal of total abstinence. Winter is not the worst time for a fast, it may even be the best, to judge from the phenomena of hibernation; only it is well to recollect that in remedial effects two fasting-days, combined with exercise in a snow-storm, are equivalent to three fasting-days in midsummer.

The influence of habit tends to make abstinence