DIET.

The other, and, unfortunately, most numerous class, know how sadly they have fallen from their first estate.  There was a time with them when they never dreamed that their stomachs were not as strong as a cider-mill, and could grind anything and everything which their greedy natures and careless habits desired.  There is no other living animal, except it be the hog, that can eat and tolerate just the same variety of materials, cooked and raw, as man.  Their tastes and habits are strikingly alike, it must be confessed, and their ends are not unlike; both die untimely deaths, with this difference, one is in due time killed, while the other, in equally due time, usually kills himself, the advantage being in favor of the porker, since his career, if brief, is, also, to the limit, blissful.

The habits of men are a curious mixture of sense and the want of it.  Endowed with some of the highest attributes, and yet forgetting that they are anything beyond the veriest machines.  They who leap from docks and bridges are not the only suicides.  These shock the world, and are not uncommonly denied the last kindly offices of the church, while the slower suicides are borne triumphantly from the chancel within to that without—­all turning on methods, and that is, indeed, important.  Method in living should receive our earliest and best attention.  All need to become good methodists, especially in some senses of that word.

The English men and women are the most systematic in their habits of living; and, as a natural result, they are remarkably robust.  They take ample time in which to eat.  An hour at dinner is as little time as they customarily allow, while those who can, often devote much more.  They eat slowly, and talk a great deal, and laugh much, and by the time they have done they are fairly red in the face, and keep so pretty much all the time; and it is as healthy a sign as one can hang out.  Good digestion waits on appetite with them, and they grow stout and formidable.  They not only eat slow, but they know what to eat and what makes good blood.  Suppose every Englishman could be sent into France and obliged to live on French cooking; does any one suppose they would remain the same people they now are?  Not a bit of it.  Take from John Bull his roast beef, and mode of eating it, and you change the character of the race inside of a century.  They must have their favorite dish, and about as often as a friend of ours, Dr. M——­, who, by the way, is a good type of an Englishman, and enjoys the things of this world much more than is common with Americans.  On asking M——­ how often he indulged in roast beef, he replied, that about three hundred and sixty-five times in the year was his rule!  Invalids may be assured it was not a bad one.  Of course, he took a great deal of active exercise, seldom using a horse while engaged in the practice of his profession.