n,
chiefly, who have developed gymnastic exercises to their present
elaboration, while the working out of their curative applications was
chiefly due to Ling, a Swede. In the German manuals, such, for instance,
as Eiselen's "Turnuebungen," are to be found nearly all the stock
exercises of our institutions. Until within a few years, American skill
has added nothing to these, except through the medium of the circus; but
the present revival of athletic exercises is rapidly placing American
gymnasts in advance of the _Turners_, both in the feats performed and
in the style of doing them. Never yet have I succeeded in seeing a
thoroughly light and graceful German gymnast, while again and again I
have seen Americans who carried into their severest exercise such
an airy, floating elegance of motion, that all the beauty of Greek
sculpture appeared to return again, and it seemed as if plastic art
might once more make its studio in the gymnasium.

The apparatus is not costly. Any handful of young men in the smallest
country-village, with a very few dollars and a little mechanical skill,
can put up in any old shed or shoe-shop a few simple articles of
machinery, which will, through many a winter evening, vary the monotony
of the cigar and the grocery-bench by an endless variety of manly
competitions. Fifteen cents will bring by mail from the publishers of
the "Atlantic" Forrest's little sixpenny "Handbook," which gives a
sufficient number of exercises to form an introduction to all others;
and a gymnasium is thus easily established. This is just the method of
the simple and sensible Germans, who never wait for elegant upholstery.
A pair of plain parallel bars, a movable vaulting-bar, a wooden horse,
a spring-board, an old mattress to break the fall, a few settees where
sweethearts and wives may sit with their knitting as spectators, and
there is a _Turnhalle_ complete,--to be henceforward filled, two or
three nights in every week, with cheery German faces, jokes, laughs,
gutturals, and gambols.

But this suggests that you are being kept too long in the anteroom. Let
me act as cicerone through this modest gymnastic hall of ours. You will
better appreciate all this oddly shaped apparatus, if I tell you in
advance, as a connoisseur does in his picture-gallery, precisely what
you are expected to think of each particular article.

You will notice, however, that a part of the gymnastic class are
exercising without apparatus, in a seri