56 Among Men and Horses. 



a fat producer, it is not as bad, in this connection, as fat or 

 sugar, and is a necessity to health in our diet. My advice to 

 a person who wants to get down weight and retain health 

 at the same time, would be to give up all fat and sugar, 

 reduce the amount of the daily ration by a half or two-thirds 

 as the case might require, and double, treble or quadruple the 

 amount of the daily exercise. Getting down weight by Bant- 

 ing, Epsom salts or other medicines, Turkish baths, and 

 ' sweating,' ruins the health. I may mention that the famous 

 jockey, John Osborne, continued, till he was well over fifty, 

 to ride about two stone under his ordinary weight and to keep 

 his health, simply by self-denial in the matter of eating and 

 drinking, and hard exercise in the form of daily walks of 

 about twenty-five miles in length. In applying the adjective 

 ' healthy ' to a man who has wasted a great deal below his 

 ordinary weight, I do so, comparatively. Although the 

 functions of the body of a man who has 'got off' a lot of 

 weight, may be in the best possible condition for undergoing 

 violent and prolonged exertion, it is far less able to resist an 

 attack of disease, than if it were in its normal state. I had a 

 very sad instance of this in the death of a great friend of 

 mine who, abhorring the idea of getting fat, kept himself light 

 merely by hard exercise and by restricting his food and drink 

 within very moderate limits. Happening to receive a chill 

 during a wet day's shooting, he got congestion of the lungs 

 and died in a few days. The doctors who attended him were 

 convinced that had he had more fat in his system, he would 

 have pulled through all right. Poor Charlie Bailey of the 

 2Oth Hussars, who was one of the finest cross-country riders 

 we have ever had in the army, was a victim to wasting. On 

 his return to England, after serving with his regiment several 

 years in India, he got some illness which, under ordinary cir- 

 cumstances would not have been attended with any serious 

 results, and died right off; his system appearing to have no 

 recuperative power left in it. 



' Ben ' Roberts of the R.H. A. was another good man on 



