Any degree of restriction in the matter of air and exercise can only be counteracted by a corresponding restriction in diet; but a generous allowance of all three is the safest rule. Sedentary persons, loiterers at the mountains or by the sea, can not easily make the proportion of fruit too large, even if during a torrid wave they eat little else. It should be taken at the regular meal hour only, to insure the greatest degree of health and comfort, should be thoroughly masticated, and the quantity may be just short of causing pressure at the kidneys, or flatulency, yet enough to prevent thirst. Three meals might then be indulged in with safety. The heavy dishes——meats, gravies, greasy articles, hot condiments, pastry, hot stimulating drinks——things that even in winter, in this climate, are only tolerated, and that but poorly, are deadly now, as the mortality reports, and lists of those who are said to have succumbed to the heat, attest. Moreover, for every one who pays the penalty with his life, tens of thousands are lying or sitting about, suffering the tortures of the damned, often; and all for a few minutes extra palate-tickling, or unnatural indulgences, rather,——for, leaving out the really unseasonable articles and condiments, they might revel in ripe fruits with comparative impunity. He is a poor student in dietetics, a thoughtless observer, even, who can not so regulate his eating as to regard summer as the most agreeable season of the year,——the most comfortable,——who can not bid defiance to the heated term and laugh at the danger of “sunstroke” though running a foot-race under the noonday sun. Calorific food, superadded to the predisposition already existing, is the real source of these strokes in every instance, the external heat furnishing, to be sure, the “last straw.” [Footnote 63: As before intimated, only the stomach disordered and enervated from the use of hot and stimulating kinds of solid and liquid food, spices and condiments, refuses to “agree” with pure, ripe fruits. Such a stomach requires a fast day, followed by the plainest and most abstemious diet, with a gradually increasing proportion of fruit as the stomach recovers “tone.” In all cases fruit requires to be thoroughly masticated, and reduced as nearly as possible to a fluid state before being swallowed.] CHAPTER XIV. THE ONE-MEAL SYSTEM.