Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/72

66 easy—as easy almost as the dietetic restrictions which our gormandizing ancestors used to dignify by the name of fasting. Lenten fare, in the South-German sense of the word, came at last to imply only the shelving of flesh-pots, without excluding eggs, butter, cheese, oysters and fish, in any desired quantities. The greasy made dishes and eel-pies of the Bavarian refectories were perfect burlesques on the bona-fide fasts of the poor, and there is an anecdote about an Austrian granger who had attended a revival, and upon his return was seized with qualms of conscience at the sight of preparation for a feast of gravy dumplings. "Say, Jane, this is Good Friday," he muttered, "a dozen of those things is really too much for creatures who have souls to save. Make only ten, this time; but"—after some reflection—"you can make them a little larger than last week."

Yet with all their cart blanche of butter-pan dishes some slaves of habit contrived to get spiritual license for meat-rations on traveling-days, "on account of the extra fatigue and exposure to wind and weather."

But in the highlands of Algeria, in a climate almost as rigorous as that of the Alps, the soldiers