air her horses. It is a beautiful parental trait; but for those
born horseless, what an economical substitute is the wooden quadruped of
the gymnasium! Our Autocrat has well said, that the livery-stable horse
is "a profligate animal"; and I do not wonder that the Centaurs of old
should be suspected of having originated spurious coin. Undoubtedly it
was to pay for the hire of their own hoofs.

For young men in cities, too, the facilities for exercise are limited
not only by money, but by time. They must commonly take it after dark.
It is every way a blessing, when the gymnasium divides their evenings
with the concert, the book, or the public meeting. Then there is no
time left, and small temptation, for pleasures less pure. It gives an
innocent answer to that first demand for evening excitement which perils
the soul of the homeless boy in the seductive city. The companions whom
he meets at the gymnasium are not the ones whose pursuits of later
nocturnal hours entice him to sin. The honest fatigue of his exercises
calls for honest rest. It is the nervous exhaustion of a sedentary,
frivolous, or joyless life which madly tries to restore itself by the
other nervous exhaustion of debauchery. It is an old prescription,--

"Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit,
_Abstinuit venere et vino_."

There is another class of critics whose cant is simply can't, and who,
being unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to these simple
sources of enjoyment, are grandiloquent upon the dignity of manhood,
and the absurdity of full-grown men in playing monkey-tricks with their
bodies. Full-grown men? There is not a person in the world who can
afford to be a "full-grown man" through all the twenty-four hours. There
is not one who does not need, more than he needs his dinner, to have
habitually one hour in the day when he throws himself with boyish
eagerness into interests as simple as those of boys. No church or state,
no science or art, can feed us all the time; some morsels there must be
of simpler diet, some moments of unadulterated play. But dignity? Alas
for that poor soul whose dignity must be "preserved,"--preserved in
the right culinary sense, as fruits which are growing dubious in their
natural state are sealed up in jars to make their acidity presentable!
"There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned," and degradation in
the dignity that has to be preserved. Simplicity is the only dignity. If
one has not the genuin