All this while his diet appears to have been the usual diet of that part of New England in which he resided---too stimulating, and too much refined by cookery. In general, too, his active and perverted appetite led him to excess in quantity; but, as his friends never thought of its being a morbid or diseased appetite, no strong efforts were made to control it. In truth, as he was feeble and growing, it was thought necessary that he should eat stimulating and highly seasoned food, and in large quantity. He was also accustomed to tea and coffee. All his appetites, as it afterwards appeared, were, to say the least, very active, though the gratification of _the third appetite_ was wholly confined to solitude. No restriction, nor indeed any direction, so far as I could learn, had been made at this period, with regard to his mental food. Whatever he chose to read, he was indulged in, both as regards quantity and quality. And as usually happens, in the case of epileptic, and scrofulous people, he was quite too much inclined to works of imagination, with which the age and country abound. It appears, also, that being regarded as quite unequal to the task of laboring in field or garden, he was thus, in large measure, deprived of two essentials of health and happiness, especially to epileptics; viz., air and exercise. In August, 1853, he went to an institution that had once been a water-cure establishment, but which had undergone many modifications, till it better deserved the name of College of Hygiene, than water cure. Here he remained several months. The peculiar treatment he received at this institution consisted, first, in a plain and unstimulating diet. Water was his only drink, and bread and fruits, with a few well-cooked vegetables, his only food. But, in the second place, he was subjected to a course of treatment not unlike that described in Chapter LXXIX, with the exception of the deep breathing and cold-bathing. The last, however, was, I believe, used occasionally. There was, indeed, one important addition made to the treatment above alluded to. This consisted in an exercise designed to expand and strengthen the lungs, by what was called _shaking down the air_. This exercise was practised very frequently, and was curious. I will describe it as well as I can.