Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: QUEER EXPERIENCES OF A REMITTANCE MAN PERHAPS of all forms of adventure which beset those who find their pleasure in wandering abroad, the deprivation of food or water for prolonged periods is most dreaded by those who have been forced to submit to it. In the case of water, of course, the period can never be very prolonged, for the human system will not work without it, and I doubt if any authenticated case could be found of a human being existing in a conscious or active state without it, or some substitute for it, for more than ten days. Three days in the Zambesi desert was quite enough for me. Joseph McCabe, the South African traveller and explorer back in the fifties, was nineteen days in the Kalahari without a drop of water for himself or oxen, but then melons grew profusely and formed an excellent substitute. But it is really astonishing how long one can subsist with little or no food. Five days without a mouthful of anything but water I found to have no appreciable effect, either at the time or subsequently.In fact, I believe I was all the better for it. But a month's starvation, or what practically amounted to starvation, had a lasting effect upon me which I have never shaken off. It was in New Zealand, twenty-two years ago. I was there for my sins. Fifteen years of rolling about the world had resulted in a crop of moss that would not have fetched a brass farthing in the open market. It was suggested to me that I should retire to the solitudes of New Zealand as a hopeless failure, and there hide my abashed head. I had been enjoying myself to the top of my bent, and as the process emptied my pockets, why, I felt no humiliation in accepting the fifty pounds per quarter which my father, a fairly wealthy man, intimated that he would forward to me. But man proposes,...