down until rested, and then “travel a bit and rest again,” and so spend the entire day, taking no lunch, and eating nothing, drinking from a brook or a spring when thirsty, returning at night, often as late as seven or eight o’clock, when he would eat a little coarse food after resting, and then go to bed. “A couple of weeks” of this sort of life sufficed to bring him home at night with an “appetite for a side of sole-leather,” and he would eat a hearty supper——always of the plainest food——and soon go to bed. From this point his recovery was as rapid as his decline had been. His diet has always been of the plainest sort, mostly vegetable (a large proportion of coarse bread and fruit),——“My drink is always cold water, and I let the rest of the family eat all the fancy stuff,” he remarked. Mr. Vickers,——who is a devout Christian man, and his story corroborated in every feature by others as reliable,——is now sixty-six years old, though he appears like a robust, well-preserved man of fifty. Excepting under very aggravated conditions, as for example, the case of Mr. Vickers, given above, rarely does any creature ever _begin_ to have consumption with a sound stomach, liver, and intestines. Nor can the digestive organs become diseased, ordinarily, so long as the diet and general regimen are even approximately correct. If we thought more of what would “tickle” the stomach and intestines than the palate, simply, we would banish most of our disorders; pure air, active exercise, a _clear conscience_, and the cultivation of a spirit of cheerfulness, kindliness, and contentment, would send the balance a-flying. Upon the importance of cheerfulness, a recent writer, a physician with a large practice, and a man of keen perceptions, says: “One of the most important directions of all is personal and subjective. Cultivate with the utmost force possible the habit of cheerfulness. No words can put this out with the strength and weight which I should be glad to give to it. Its value is utterly beyond estimation. The difference between meeting the common, or uncommon, trials of life with cheerfulness or with despondency, and perhaps complaint and grumbling, is often just the difference between life and death.” The appetite for “sweets”——candy, syrup, sugar, and fancy dishes deluged with sweet sauces——encouraged to an abnormal degree from infancy, and the gratification of this appetite throughout life are prolific aids in establishing the phthisical diathesis. There is a natural appetite for _sweet fruits_ and this demand may be safely met by such forms of food, but never by the unbalancing artificial sweets, or _proximate principles_ of food, as cane or beet sugar and the “bon-bons” formed from them.