DIETETIC CURIOSITIES. 727 



soldier on the march, and the followers of Don Carlos contented them- 

 selves 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 resi- 

 dents 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 Catha- 

 rine, acting on a recommendation of the Governor of Novgorod, com- 

 muted 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 Kiri- 

 lov 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 con- 

 tained 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 2^olcnta (chest- 

 nut-meal), and the Moors of mediaeval Spain used to provision their 

 fortified cities with chestnuts and olive-oil. During the siege of Luck- 

 now the native soldiers asked that the little rice left be given to their 

 British comrades ; as for themselves, they could do with the sokj), 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 na- 



