Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/747

Rh soldier on the march, and the followers of Don Carlos contented themselves with even less. A correspondent of the "Daily News" was served with a dish of radishes in a Catalan tavern, and ventured the remark that radishes were taken after meals in northern Europe. "You can get some more after finishing these," was the reply. The radishes constituted the dinner.

Not that men should, but that they can, live on bread alone, is abundantly proved by the records of Old-World prisons. Silvio Pellico, the Italian patriot and martyr, subsisted for seven years on coarse rye bread and water, which experience had taught him to prefer to the putrid pork-soup of his Austrian bastile. The prisoners of the Khedive were fed on rice and Indian corn, till the prayers of the French residents and his American officers induced him to sweeten their bitter lot by a weekly bottle of sakarra, or diluted molasses; and I learn from an article in a French journal that some of these unfortunates, who had passed long years without any hint of sakarra, were forced by chronic bowel complaints to return to their old dry fare.

Fedor Darapski, born 1774 in Karskod near Praga, eastern Poland, was brought to the government of Novgorod in his twenty-second year as a conscript to the Russian army, and was soon after sentenced to death for mutiny and assault with intent to kill. The Empress Catharine, acting on a recommendation of the Governor of Novgorod, commuted his sentence to imprisonment for life, but ordered that on every anniversary of the deed (an attempt to kill his colonel) the convict should receive forty lashes and be kept on half rations for a week after; the full ration being two pounds of black bread and a jug of cold water. On these terms Darapski was boarded at the fortress of Kirilov till 1863, when at the approach of his ninetieth birthday he was again recommended to mercy and liberated by order of the present Czar.

Even the story of Nebuchadnezzar may be more than an allegory, as the wild berries, roots, and grass-seeds of the Assyrian valleys contained surely as much nourishment as sour rye-bread; and who knows but grass itself might do for a while, since the Slavonian peasants often subsist for weeks at a time on sauerkraut and cabbage-soup?

Corsican farmers live all winter on dried fruit and polenta (chestnut-meal), and the Moors of mediæval Spain used to provision their fortified cities with chestnuts and olive-oil. During the siege of Lucknow the native soldiers asked that the little rice left be given to their British comrades; as for themselves, they could do with the soup, i. e., the water in which the rice had been boiled!

But the ne plus ultra of abstinence combined with robust strength is furnished in the record of Shamyl, the heroic Circassian, who for the last two years of the war that ended with his capture had nothing but water for his drink and roasted beechnuts for his food, and yet month after month defied the power of the Russian Empire in his