Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/98

92 pure water from a cold mountain spring, and proved that for the treatment of debilitating disorders his prescriptions made drugs superfluous.

The theories of the water doctor, as his neighbors called him, were founded on personal experience. Soon after taking charge of a small farm he had been all but killed in a runaway accident. His survival seemed doubtful, and when he left the hospital of a neighboring city he "was a mere bundle of disabilities," stiff-jointed, half lame, and troubled with all sorts of pains and disorders. A swollen foot having been greatly benefited by immersion in cold water, the convalescent tried the effect of an occasional sitz-bath, then of daily all-over sponge-baths, and before the end of the second year had got rid of all his ailments. As far as he could remember, he had, indeed, never felt better in his life, except in early boyhood when a relative now and then took him out to a berry-picking camp in the highlands, and the little lad "wondered if the dwellers in paradise could have been much happier."

In his subsequent school-years he used to take long rambles all by himself, feeling more at home in the mountain cliffs than in the tobacco-clouded village tavern—evidently a child of Nature, with