He also placed great reliance on good food and drink. Animal food he rejected, and condiments. I have neither known nor read of any vegetarian, of Britain or America, who carried his dietetic peculiarities to what would, by most, be regarded as an extreme, more than he. And yet his patients, with few exceptions, submitted to it with a much better grace than I had expected. Some of them, it is true, took advantage of his absence or their own, and made a little infringement upon the rigidity of his prescriptions, but these were exceptions to the general rule; and I believe the transgressors themselves regretted it in the end--fully satisfied that every indulgence was but a postponement of the hour of their discharge. One thing was permanently regarded as ultra. He did not believe in breakfasting; and therefore kept every patient, who wished to come under his most thorough treatment, from the use of food till about the middle of the day. This permitted of but two meals a day, which, however, is one more than has sometimes been recommended by O. S. Fowler, the phrenologist, and even by a few others. The main error, however, of this air-cure practice,--if error there was in it,--consisted in the idea of its applicability to everybody, in every circumstance. For though it may be true that as large a proportion of inveterate cases of disease would disappear under such treatment as under any other, yet there are probably not a few to whom it would be utterly unadapted. CHAPTER LXXII. THE CLERGYMAN. An Ohio clergyman, just setting out in his ministerial career, consulted me, one day, about his health and future physical prospects. His nervous system and cerebral centre had been over-taxed and partially prostrated; and his digestive and muscular powers were suffering from sympathy. In short, he was a run-down student, who, in order to be resuscitated, needed rest. It was not, however, the rest of mere inertia that he required, but rest from those studies to which his attention had been long and patiently confined. His bodily powers were, indeed, flagging with the rest; but then it was impossible for him to be restored without _some_ exercise. In truth, it was not so much a _rest_ of body, mind, or heart that he needed, as a _change_.