a sleepy evening, and to arouse a whole family next morning
for the adjustment over the breakfast-table of that momentous
state-question, whether the red king should have castled at the fiftieth
move or not till the fifty-first. But for an average American man, who
leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace
of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders, utterly
exhausted in the daily effort to put ten dollars more of distance
between his posterity and the poor-house,--for such a one to kindle up
afresh after office-hours for a complicated chess-problem seems much as
if a wood-sawyer, worn out with his week's work, should decide to order
in his saw-horse on Saturday evening, and saw for fun. Surely we have
little enough recreation at any rate, and, pray, let us make that little
un-intellectual. True, something can be said in favor of chess--for
instance, that no money can be made out of it, and that it is so far
profitable to us overworked Americans: but even this is not enough. For
this once, lock your brains into your safe, at nightfall, with your
other valuables; don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the
Gymnasium.

Ten leaps up a steep, worn-out stairway, through a blind entry to
another stairway, and yet another, and we emerge suddenly upon the floor
of a large lighted room, a mere human machine-shop of busy motion, where
Indian clubs are whirling, dumb-bells pounding, swings vibrating, and
arms and legs flying in all manner of unexpected directions. Henderson
sits with his big proportions quietly rested against the weight-boxes,
pulling with monotonous vigor at the fifty-pound weights,--"the
Stationary Engine" the boys call him. For a contrast, Draper is floating
up and down between the parallel bars with such an airy lightness, that
you think he must have hung up his body in the dressing-room, and is
exercising only in his arms and clothes. Parsons is swinging in the
rings, rising to the ceiling before and behind; up and down he goes,
whirling over and over, converting himself into a mere tumbler-pigeon,
yet still bound by the long, steady vibration of the human pendulum.
Another is running a race with him, if sitting in the swing be running;
and still another is accompanying their motion, clinging to the
_trapeze_. Hayes, meanwhile, is spinning on the horizontal bar, now
backward, now forward, twenty times without stopping, pinioned through
his bent arms, like a Faki