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Try what diet will do, as opening the bowels by a regulated diet is far preferable to the giving of aperients. Let him have either bran-bread or Robinson's Patent Groats, or Robinson's Pure Scotch Oatmeal made into gruel with new milk, or Du Barry's Arabica Revalenta, or a slice of Huntly and Palmer's lump gingerbread.
Of bread, the fifteenth century had several descriptions in use: pain-main or bread of very fine flour, wheat-bread, barley-meal bread, bran-bread, bean-bread, pease-bread, oat-bread or oat-cakes, hard-bread, and unleavened bread. The poor often used a mixture of rye, lentils, and oatmeal, varied according to the season and district.
But, after all, the best opening medicines are cold ablutions every morning of the whole body, attention to diet, variety of food, bran-bread, grapes, stewed prunes, French plums, Muscatel raisins, figs, fruit both cooked and raw if it be ripe and sound, oatmeal porridge, lentil powder, in the form of Du Barry's Arabica Revalenta, vegetables of all kinds, especially spinach, exercise in the open air, early rising, daily visiting the water-closet at a certain hour there is nothing keeps the bowels open so regularly and well as establishing the habit of visiting the water-closet at a certain hour every morning, and the other rules of health specified in these Conversations.
Then we sat down to tiffin "bull-mate an' bran-bread," Mulvaney called it by the side of the river, and took pot shots at the crocodiles in the intervals of cutting up the food with our only pocket-knife. Then we drank up all the beer, and threw the bottles into the water and fired at them. After that, we eased belts and stretched ourselves on the warm sand and smoked.
"E'en as you like the thoughts of dining on bran-bread and milk-porridge an extremity which you trust never to be reduced to. But all this shall not prevent me from pledging you in a cup of sound claret."
He evidently prefers roast-beef and brown-stout to bran-bread and cold water, and has gone so far as to sing the praises of pale-ale. He thinks the laboring classes should have their pot of beer, if the nobility and gentry are to eat good dinners and take airings in Hyde Park, on Sundays. He is a Merry Englishman, as to the stomach, and, like a Merry Englishman, enjoys good living.
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