As nothing is so destructive to the body as this kind of food, so
nothing is so plentiful and cheap; but it was perhaps the only cheap
thing the farmer disliked. Probably living much on fish might produce
this disgust; for Diodorus Siculus attributes the same aversion in a
people of Ethiopia to the same cause; he calls them the fish-eaters,
and asserts that they cannot be brought to eat a single meal with the
Heautofagi by any persuasion, threat, or violence whatever, not even
though they should kill their children before their faces.

What hath puzzled our physicians, and prevented them from setting this
matter in the clearest light, is possibly one simple mistake, arising
from a very excusable ignorance; that the passions of men are capable of
swallowing food as well as their appetites; that the former, in feeding,
resemble the state of those animals who chew the cud; and therefore,
such men, in some sense, may be said to prey on themselves, and as it
were to devour their own entrails. And hence ensues a meager aspect and
thin habit of body, as surely as from what is called a consumption. Our
farmer was one of these. He had no more passion than an Ichthuofagus or
Ethiopian fisher. He wished not for anything, thought not of anything;
indeed, he scarce did anything or said anything. Here I cannot be
understood strictly; for then I must describe a nonentity, whereas I
would rob him of nothing but that free agency which is the cause of all
the corruption and of all the misery of human nature. No man, indeed,
ever did more than the farmer, for he was an absolute slave to labor
all the week; but in truth, as my sagacious reader must have at first
apprehended, when I said he resigned the care of the house to his wife,
I meant more than I then expressed, even the house and all that belonged
to it; for he was really a farmer only under the direction of his wife.
In a word, so composed, so serene, so placid a countenance, I never saw;
and he satisfied himself by answering to every question he was asked, "I
don't know anything about it, sir; I leaves all that to my wife."

Now, as a couple of this kind would, like two vessels of oil, have made
no composition in life, and for want of all savor must have palled every
taste; nature or fortune, or both of them, took care to provide a proper
quantity of acid in the materials that formed the wife, and to render
her a perfect helpmate for so tranquil a husband. She abounded in
whats