THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. i 9 i 



the respiratory organs ; on the contrary, it strengthens them. Sta- 

 tistics show that lecturing and preaching savants outlive their graphic 

 colleagues. In Carrollton, near New Orleans, I knew a hectic old 

 Mexican banana-vender who was so short of breath that he had often 

 to clutch the legs of his chair in his dire struggles for life-air, and 

 who told me that every few days or so he had to hitch up his mar- 

 ket-wagon, and bawl out his wares at the top of his voice, and for 

 hours together in order to ease his lungs. Intead of speaking in a 

 whisper, consumptives should envy cattle-drivers, whose business gives 

 them a plausible pretext for yelling. 



The prejudice against after-dinner speeches is founded upon a more 

 valid reason. Rest, mental and physical, is really a prime condition 

 of a thorough digestion. Invalids, especially, need a liberal siesta, 

 and a two hours' nap in the shade of a shelving rock can do no harm. 

 Long, sultry afternoons, though, are unknown in the highlands, and 

 before 3 p. m. the air will again be cool enough for any kind of out- 

 door sport. If the spring needs cleaning out, a wheelbarrow full of 

 flat rocks from the next creek will turn it into a deep, limpid brunnen, 

 where a pail can be filled at a single dip. On sunny days butterfly- 

 hunters may bag their game on every mountain-meadow. Grasshop- 

 pers can be flushed by the dozen, and make the best bait for brook- 

 trout. The rock-benches at the water's edge would invite to a pro- 

 longed session if other pastimes were not too tempting and numerous. 

 There are raspberries and muscadines in the brake ; farther up the 

 woods are strewed with chestnuts, and the collector soon learns to find 

 the little dells where they accumulate, like nuggets in the cavities of 

 a California gold -creek. 



It is astonishing how work of that sort makes the hours vanish, 

 together with many evils which tedium is apt to aggravate : languor, 

 spleen, and dull headache. But more wonderful yet is its effect on the 

 disorders of the respiratory organs. Under anything like favorable 

 circumstances the lungs are, indeed, the most curable part of the 

 human body. With every inspiration the balm of pure air can be 

 brought into contact with the thousand times thousand air-cells of the 

 respiratory apparatus,* and, as we breathe about twenty times per 

 minute, the panacea can be applied twenty-seven thousand times in 

 twenty-four hours. Every day six hundred and eighty cubic feet of 

 gaseous food circulates through the lungs of a full-grown man, carry- 

 ing nourishment and restoratives to every fiber and enabling it to rid 

 itself of its morbid excretions. The rapidity of the remedial process 

 has more than once forced upon me the thought, " What persistent out- 

 rages against the health laws of Nature must it have required to make 

 the lungs the seat of a chronic disease ! " 



* " It has been calculated by M. Rouehoux that as many as 17, 790 air-cells are grouped 

 around each terminal bronchus, and that their total number amounts to not less than 

 600,000,000 " (Carpenter's " Physiology , p. 507). 



