raw ham, a suck at sailor-boots, and general
starvation. It weakened them, but it didn't hurt them. It put them in
fine shape to eat heartily of hearty food and build themselves up to a
condition of robust health. But they did not know enough to profit by
that; they lost their opportunity; they remained invalids; it served
them right. Do you know the trick that the health-resort doctors play?'

'What is it?'

'My system disguised--covert starvation. Grape-cure, bath-cure,
mud-cure--it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make
a show and do a trifle of the work--the real work is done by the
surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late
hours--at both ends of the day--now consider what he has to do at a
health resort. He gets up at 6 in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up
and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly.
Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's
breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him
he says anxiously, "My water!--I am walking off my water!--please don't
interrupt," and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied roseleaf. Lies
at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't read,
mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his
pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens
for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's bath--half
a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg.
A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade
solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at 6--half a doughnut and a cup
of tea. Walk again. Half-past 8, supper--more butterfly; at 9, to bed.
Six weeks of this regime--think of it. It starves a man out and puts
him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New
York, Jericho--anywhere.'

'How long does it take to put a person in condition here?'

'It ought to take but a day or two; but in fact it takes from one to six
weeks, according to the character and mentality of the patient.'

'How is that?'

'Do you see that crowd of women playing football, and boxing, and
jumping fences yonder? They have been here six or seven weeks. They were
spectral poor weaklings when they came. They were accustomed to nibbling
at dainties and delicacies at set hours four times a day, and they had
no appetite for anything. I questioned them, and