How to Live.

Otago Witness, Issue 1916, 6 November 1890, Page 42

How to Live.

There are two things we chiefly wish for while we live — health, to make life enjoyable, and length of days, to make it lasting. To obtain both mainly depends on ourselves.

We do not simply die ; we usually kill ourselves. Our habits, our passions, our anxieties of body and mind, shorten our lives.

The key to^health and long life is sobriety in living. It is the fashion to restrict the term sobriety in the use of intoxicating liquors.

We say with truth that the drunkard is killing himself, but we rarely speak of overeating as a shortener of life.

A sober life implies moderation in all things. "It consists," says Cornan, "in moderate eating, in moderate drinking, and in a moderate enjoyment of all pleasures of life ; in keeping the mind moderately but constantly employed, in cultivating the aff.ee tions moderately, in avoiding extremes of heat and cold, and in shunning excessive excitement either of body or mind. A sober life is a life of order, of rule, of temperance — that divine sobriety which is grateful to God, friendly to Nature, the daughter of reason, the sister of virtue, the companion of temperate living — modest, gentle, content with little, guided by a rule and line in all its operations."

It is an important rule to observe and practise for health, comfort, and our peace within and without, to attack every ailment and malady at its beginning, to arrest the premonitory symptoms before they take root in our vitals, and gradually or quickly interrupt the normal action^'of the organs. A loss of strength, a weakened memory, a tottering walk, all bespeak a mental or physical disorder, which, if not arrested in the early stage, will lead to disease and fatal consequences. •

" One can hardly believe," says Reveille, " how far a little health, well treated, will carry us."

" And the rule of the sage," says Cicero, " is to make use of what one has, and to act in everything according to one's strength."

Old and Young Should not Sleep Together. — A prominent medical writer says that no intelligent perfon who loves his children will allow them to sleep with persons greatly older than themselves. The nervous vitality of a child should not be absorbed by any diseased or a^ed relative or friend. Children, compared with adults, are electrically in a positive condition. The rapid changes which are going on in their little bodies abundantly generate and as extensively work up vital nervo-electric fluids. But when, by contact for long nights with elder and negative persons, the vitalising electricity of their tender organisations is ab -orbed, they soon pine, grow pale, languid, and dull, while their bed companions feel a corresponding invigouration. It is undeniable that healthful influences are lost, and to a fatal extent sometimes, by this ill-advised custom. A woman was prostrated with incurable consumption. Her infant occupied the same bed with her almost conf tantly day and night. The mother lingered for months on the verge of the g>ave, her demise being hourly expected. Still she lingered on, daily disproving the predictions of her medical attendants. The child, meanwhile, pined without any apparent disease. Its once fat little cheeks fell away with singular rapidity till every bone in its face was visible. Finally it had imparted to the mother its last spark of , vitality and simultaneously both died,