Could any touchiness exceed that of Robert Duke of Normandy? According to Holinshed, the king, in trying on a new cloak, with a hood, and finding it too tight for him, directed that the garment should be taken to his brother (the duke), who was a smaller man. A slight rent, however, had been made in the garment, and the duke perceiving it, and hearing that the cloak had been tried on by the king, indignantly exclaimed, "Now I perceive I have lived too long, since my brother clothes me like an almsman in his cast-rent garments," and refusing all food, starved himself to death.—London
Evening Standard.
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TOUGHNESS The path of safety in the moral as in the physical realm is not so much the avoidance of risks as the training of the faculties to resist. It is a question well worth considering what it is that makes the savage so hardy. He lives nearer to nature than does the civilized man, and that is the reason he is hardier, tougher, and more enduring. Civilized men have departed far from the natural order of life, and they are suffering the penalty—a shortened and a feeble life. Unfortunately, the majority of civilized human beings subject themselves to a hot-*house regimen, apparently thinking that the most important thing in winter is to keep away the cold. A cold day is a dangerous thing to one who is not ready for it. January and February are deadly months to those who are not prepared for them. During these months many people are carried off by pneumonia. After people have reached the age of forty or fifty years, they are particularly susceptible to this disease, because of the lowered power of resistance. Toughness is the result of the body's power of resistance. (Text.)—Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Good Health.
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Trades Exempt from Disease—See Disease, Exemption from. TRADITION Custom makes laws harder to break than those of the land in which we may happen to live. It frequently happens that these laws are founded on experience, on mature judgment, on good sense, but occasionally they are founded on old superstitions which in other forms have passed away. Among the unfortunate customs that still linger is the habit of crippling the left hand. If a child in shaking hands offers the left, the horrified mother or nurse at once corrects the blunder and apologizes for it to the bystanders. She does not know why she does this beyond the fact that "it is the custom"; she does not know that in medieval times the right hand was the "dextrous" hand, the hand of good faith, while the left was the "sinister" hand, the hand of bad faith. We have crystallized these beliefs in our present interpretation of these words; if we are "dextrous" we are doing things in a right-handed way, while the mildest meaning given to "sinister" is "unfortunate or awkward." So the child is crippled in its left hand to conform to a custom which has been discarded and forgotten. (Text.)—The Medical Times.
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See Custom.
TRADITION, UNMEANING
One of the oldest customs in the navy and
one that is often puzzling to the landsman is
that of "saluting the quarter-deck." Many
have the hazy idea that the national colors
are its object and that it is merely a naval
fad. While to a certain extent it is a fad, it
is one of hoary antiquity, being a survival of
the days when a crucifix was placed on the
stern of a ship and was always saluted as a
matter of course. When the crucifix was
taken away the old feeling still remained,
and men continued to salute the place where
it had been. The younger generation imitated
their elders, and the salute became a
habit and continues until this day, (Text.)
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TRAINING
Commander Robert E. Peary was asked what training was necessary for arctic exploration work. This was his reply:
One can train for arctic exploration as
one would train for a prize-fight. The training
consists of good habits, with sound,
healthy body as a basis to work on. One
must be sound of wind and limb, to use the
horseman's phrase, and he must not be a
quitter. That's the kind of training that
finds the pole. (Text.)
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