Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/179

 and I wouldn’t stand for it. I got up and walked out, and I’ve come this far. From the minute I started, and for long before, when that hot, chemically saturated boiling spring water soaked into me, I couldn’t help feeling that it was fostering germs and breeding more. For six months I’ve wakened in the night thinking about the sea, and I’d gotten to the place where, when I decided to walk out, I headed for a cooler spot and for the ocean. Now I’ve gotten here and I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to try it. I want to go over a list of food with you; I want you to cook me plain, simple, nourishing stuff, something that’s got iron in it, something that will have a tendency to purify and to clean up blood saturated with poison.

“When I finish my morning rounds with the bees, I am going to put on that bathing suit at the back door; I am going down the back walk and I’m going to squeeze a tumbler level full of the juice of a couple of those big red tomatoes and drink it, and then I’m going on down to the sea and I am going in mighty close to the edge of those bandages. I’m not so sure that I am not going heels over. Then I’m coming out and I’m going to lie on the hottest sand in the hottest stretch of sun I can find and cover the bare parts until I get toughened enough that I won’t blister. I’m going to let the sun dry that salt water into my anatomy, I’m not going to rinse it off. Then I’m coming up and eat whatever you prepare for me in the kind of combinations we agree on that will go toward the making of a man. Then I’m going to take a nap. Then