Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/380

Rh , and, 5, after each of the two daily meals a walk of three thousand paces. The restraint of anger I have thus explained in a letter, "In physical care the fundamental thing is not to get angry." The two principles of regularity in meals and sleep the honourable Sing-kong practised forty years, and I have been doing it seven. I recently tried taking three thousand paces after meals and shall never again give it up through carelessness.

With a modern point of view he also insists on the value of sunshine and fresh air. "If the house is too damp people will be affected and it will injure the digestion. Where a house is high and the inner court small, the air does not enter easily, and the same is true regarding the sunshine. You must find some way to drive out the dampness and you will not get sick."

In the same letter where he instructed his sons about their studies he proposed six rules of hygiene in order that they might not fail by reason of poor health: (1) one thousand paces after meals, (2) a foot-bath before retiring, (3) the avoidance of anger, (4) regular periods of quiet resting, (5) the regular practice of archery (which he considered an excellent way to develop the muscles), and (6) a simple breakfast at dawn of a single bowl of rice without other dishes.

During the last two years of his life his old eye trouble returned; he had already lost the use of one eye at the time of the T'ientsin massacre. Attacks of dizziness troubled him, too, from time to time. Only a few days before his death an especially severe attack, which caused his friends no little alarm, occurred suddenly while he was being borne in his sedan chair to greet a guest at the riverside. This ill health made him all the more eager to conserve what strength remained to him and to insist