THE BOKFELLOW.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 13, 16 January 1909, Page 9

THE BOKFELLOW.

» DIVAGATIONS AROUND DIET. Written for The Post by A.G.Stephens. Copyright.— All rights reserved. It is unusual (in New Zealand) to make such a confession in public ; but I love Sophie Leppel. We communicate in spirit only. 1 have not seen her virgin flesh, so admirably fed ; in the flesh I feel it is fated never shall I see her. Yet I love her ! Purely, devoutly, abstractly, entirely. When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, ehe will abide like the memory of Miss Clara Butt's religious fervour (admission, £1 Is). She does. THE AVOWAL OF A PURE PASSION. Let 'mo count my reasons for loving Sophie Leppel. I love her name. It curves in the sonorous air like a scimitar, and the curve closes with a martial clang, an invocation of the God of Battles. Sophie, "appelle, and on bat, le rappel la-naut — on the heights where Beauty is Food, Food Beauty. We eat once more of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Once more a woman feeds us to tho deed. I love her face in the portrait that is" printed with her pamphlet — the clear eyes, the firm mouth, the aggressive ear_; and I love tho square, uncompromising scrap of embroidery that bounds her clothing at the neck. It sighs of a decorative sex ; yet does not surrender. The bodice buttons in front : the eye-glass hovers lightly on the buttons, a weapon at poise. There is I know not what air of vibrant energy in the carriage of the head : on attend le rappel la-haut. I do not lovo O. L. M. Abramowski. It is unnecessary ; it might be injudicious. Sufficient to regard him blandly in the philosophic vista. In his portrait, printed with his pamphlet, he seems one of those bright personages perpetually buzzing; so agreeable for a conversational fillip, so tiresome in a boarding-house. Life demands for r§lief the gentle silence of the oyster, his unaggressive attitude, his large calm. PILLOW-PEOPLE. Pillow-people are so permanently pleasant. When I was very young I had a pillow-aunt, who existed incidentally to dissipate the fumes of juvenescence. Overworked, overworried, or having sought a tocwnelting ecstasy from the too-too-solid flesh, I could go 'to my pillow-aunt and >rest. She did nothing, said nothing; but she was. Never warm, never excited, nothing troubled her. Sijnply she sat on her sofa (since a chair was unsafe) and beamed. I basked. And , gradually invisible hands of hecuinc camo almost palpably to soothe me. As my tired head lay "(metaphorically) on my pillow-aunt, jangling nerves foil into harmony, hot pulses grew still. It is one of our own writers who has said : "She listens to tho sources „ Where olden quiet lies." It was said too swiftly, for the lines run beyond the emotion; yet it was said of my pillow-aunt. S"he listened in a long measure, leisurely. As rfie listened, I could hear, and wander with her where - "peace ' conies ' "dropping slow. ' An hour, and I rose restored, with new zest for the' battle. Foivsilence is but one side of the eternal antipbony : tho other &ido is sqund. Between rest and riot the pendulum of life must swing. Only, as civilisation increases, there is so much delightful riot, and so little delicious rest, that sound surely should occur musically, with a nice lipping of the medium, or mellowly, a natural susurrus. A HEROINE OF HEALTH. It is time to introduce Miss Sophie Leppel. She lives in England, and thence periodically emits preachments— so joyous. It is her mission, by diet to cure the ills that flesh is heir to. If I love her, it is because she is lovable and because her pamphlets are jovelv. Ihe detail of a Leppel dietary varies for every patient— good ! the principle is communicated at a fee— alas ! Yet the principle may be deduced from the pamphlet!: it is Shakespeare's— "In brief, sir, study what you most affect" —and, by a logical reversal, eat what best 'affects you. So far we ara with Miss Sophie Leppel — though she will deny it. It is not her theory, 'but the exposition of her theory, that is enthralling. She is The Food Reformer, and there are no others. So she exults over the discomfiture of false prophets : "Three More Food Reformers Dead "Others Will Follow Soon. "Mr. J. J. Greenhalgh, of Southport, died in his 76th year. -This vegetaram passed away 24 years before his time. -Miss S. E. Smith, of Kingston-en-Ihames, died suddenly, from au attack of peritonitis. She was a lifelong vegetarian, i ft "Mr. J. H. Swordfiger, a vegetarian, dropped dead t>f heart disease after a health fast of nine days." So does Miss Sophie encourage the rivals— the others. Her awn patients encourage her. "The death of a Leppel Heroine. "My readers will be sorry to hear that I have lost a patient in Bradford district. . . Though she was able to take the prescribed foods fairly well at the commencement, her strength never improved. ... In this way the young lady struggled bravely, for two months, bne kept a diary, which she sent me from time to time. There was never a mistake in it, and never a murmur that she wanted other foods than those prescribed. "This patient died like a true heroine in the struggle for health by natural means." It is an epitaph which might be multiplied — in wanganui, for example. A MARTYR OF DISEASE. in Australia lives a reformed food reformer, who in his apostolic day was ' dire as a pestilence. Hi? gospel was infectious ; and when he preached — a lank, weird man with a glitterin" eye— piedestmed victims tell like moments before the scythe of Time. The go&peJ was based on bananas and unleavened biead ; and for the pure in body bananas alone would suffice. The enthusiast himeelf lived under tho sky in fine weather, under a tent in wet; banqueted richly on three bananas a day—and contemplated marriage ! "But your wife will alter all that. She will want things to eat, things to wear, a house, and furniture in the house." , ••Ne!"-- and the prophetic eye gleamed—"she is my disciple. We shall need only— three more baaanas." He has found it otherwise. "Women," as one friendly tells me, "have so much more sense than men." But in his enthusiastic prime. . . . there was a shoemaker in an Australian suburb. Sedentary life had made him grossly corpulent, unwieldy. To him, in evil hour. Fate led the food prophet preaching his insidious gospel. The shoemaker listened, was impressed, convinced, and substituted manna for quails. He had been used to rich meats with spicy savours ; and the revulsion to unleavened bread was severe. Bread

— and water; with a banana as a treat, rarely. The shoemaker groaned : but the prophet preached, "ifou have made your body vile : it is mere carrion : first you must purify it, and then you will regain jour strength." And the shoemaker persevered. Actually faith (and hunger) removed his mountain of flesh. His skin fel) in folds around his skeleton; but his head cleared, and he became almost active. His wife (poor woman !) had been used to push 1-nn upstairs : he could now mount almost nimbly. "But I fee l weak." "You must become weak in order to become strong. You have to relieve your body of the 1 foul accumulation of forty years. Do you expect that this can be done in a day?" And the shoemaker believed — and pei severed : he was succeeding splendidly : he had even reduced his diet to three bananas a day. Then, one morning, the prophet arriving to greet and encourage the believer, was met with awful tidings. "Mr. is dead !" The shoemaker had expired, unlucky camel that he was, at the last straw of the load of gospel. "This patient died like a true hero in the struggle for health by natural means," as Miss Leppel put it; or, adapting 'Heine's more rhetorical phrase, he died a shoemaker in the liberation- war of humanity. THE STOMACH AND THE SUN. "These are our failures," as Beau Brummell said of his heap of cravats that had refused to take form pleasing to the arbiter of taste. And even the success of the Order of the Sun is still in doubt. Not everybody knows that away to our north, in the Bismarck Archipelago governed from German New Guinea, the Brotherhood of the Sun has been established on a little island, and solicits recruits from Australia and New Zealand, not to mention Europe and America. The end of the Brotherhood is (once more) to reform the human race by dictating its diet, and the simple means are sunshine and coconuts. Except in the wet season, the latitude of the' islet assures ,the sunshine, and the fertility of the islet assures the coconuts. So it is rather sad to have to say that of the three brethren who constituted the original Brotherhood, two, in Miss Leppell's words, have "passed away" — one from sunstroke, which implies an excess of sunshine ; and the other, it is hinted, from an excess of coconuts. News of the remaining Brother is awaited with great anxiety by all food reformers, and it is rather sadder to have to say that the news is not good. For this nows also we are indebted to Miss Leppel, who has an alert' correspondent in German New Guinea. This correspondent writes regarding the Brother of the Sun :—: — "Mr. Engelhardt fell ill again, and had a .large wound in spite of his coconut diet. He had to strengthen himself by eating tinned beef, fish, fowl, milk, and eggs. He is better now, and has commenced his ideal diet of coconuts again : three of his workmen also take it. The Wesleyan missionary of the neighbouring island of Ulu told me the above news. Thanks to your teaching 1 am on .the royal road to health ; and rest assured that- 1 shall not commit ihe folly of trying to live on a coconut diet. A FRUIT-FOOD REFORMER. It is past time to introduce Mr. 0. L. M. Abramowski, who is ' a 1 doctor of medicine, and lives in Australia. The fact is better stated vaguely, since to Mr. Abramowski's gospel of food reform (which makes the fourth here referred to, out of forty thousand that are not here referred to), there attaches the adverUesmeut of a patent fruit food, which niayibe the microcosm of comestible virtues — " and then agin." Dr. Abramowski's pamphlet, it should have been, said, supplies two portraits— 'and the first portrait is that of a gentleman who obviously cannot buzz. He looks, this gentleman in the first portrait, gorged and lack-lustre, and he ,is published by way of frightful contrast to the alert perron who sprang, full-fruited, from his forehead. Dr. Abramowski has to say many true things, and many thingh that are nearly true, but not quite. In effect, he says this : that as the body ages', and vitnl power fails, it must not be asked to perform the digestive iasks which In eariier years it accomplished easily. Here is the oldest wisdom, the most obvious ; but when Dr. Abramowski presses the limitation of age upon the natural appetite of youth, he defies intelligence and overpasses prudence. The science of diet is a science of truipms. While food does a man good, it does a man good, no matter what it& kind or quantity. Life is maintained either by the new strength of new food, oi by the stored strength of old food ; and to live is to draw continually upon the one fund or the other. Perpetual motion without friction is as impossible' in physiology as in mechanics — yet in each field there remain disciples of the foolish dream. , THE" CONCLUSION. " Breakfast is now a meal that nobody tioubles about in our house," says Dr. Abraaiowski, whose doctrine has been adopted by his young family. • Put r.gainst that old Lord Cockburn's die turn, that he had always found the best man, and the best cockerel, among those who mode a good breakfast. The nobreakfast plan is, in fact, a, plau loi invalids, and for invalids is doubtless often a good plan. But those who can digest, let them digest; and those who caanot digest had better chase their meals before they catch them, in ancestral fashion, before they resign themselves to the dogma of renunciation. Strong men, and strong nations, are built out of strong food — as much as they can mahtei , it is weakness, not strength, that revolts from bread and beef. O idiosyncrasy — and each must ioarn his own The mental lightness, the power of enduranc^, to'which many food reformers point in proof of the virtue of this ot tha* diet of abstinence, are in the general view a false glow, a mock vitality. The rice-fed Hindu has these qualities in high degree — and strong race after strong race has held him in subjection. The solid work of the world is accomplished by youth in conjunction with protein — and for strenuous crises the protein has to come in. the shape of meat. Ploughmen demand a plentiful breakiast; and the Japanese have delibel ately enlarged tne national dietary. In the mental field, with exceptional individuals allowed for abstinence during the period of labour must be made good by recuperation through food after labour „ oi the result .>f labom shows a definite and fundamental loss of power. And chib, xf it be not #ood doctrine for all, is the soundest doctrine tor the