argues that you ought to weigh twenty-five pounds less than you do, and
that a long daily walk will do the trick. "Look at me," he says, "I walk
ten miles every day and there isn't an ounce of superfluous flesh on
me." And so saying, he slaps his chest and offers to let you feel how
hard the muscles are about his diaphragm. Of course, there is no
superfluous flesh on Smith. And if he abstained entirely from physical
exertion and guzzled heavy German beer all day and dined on turtle soup
and roast goose every day, and ate unlimited quantities of pastry, he
would still be what he describes as free from superfluous flesh. _I_
call it scraggy. Smith is one of the men set apart by nature to
perpetuate the Don Quixote type of beauty, just as I am doomed with the
lapse of time to approximate the Falstaffian type. Smith's five sisters
and brothers are thin. His father was slight and neurasthenic. His
mother was spare and angular. Little wonder the Smith family is fond of
walking. Friction and air-resistance in their case are practically
nonexistent.

I do not, of course, mean to deny the ancient tradition that a sound
body makes a sound mind. But I would only point out that we are just
beginning to wake to the truth of the converse proposition, that a sane,
equable, easy-going mind keeps the body well. Hence there are really two
kinds of exercise, and two kinds of hygiene, a physical kind and a
spiritual kind. Which one a man will choose should be left entirely to
himself. It is only a question of approaching the same goal from two
different directions. Smith is welcome to make himself a better man by
exercising his legs three hours a day. But I prefer to sit in an
armchair and exercise my soul. Smith comes in refreshed from a
half-day's sojourn in the open air, and I come away refreshed from a
roomful of old friends talking three at a time amidst clouds of tobacco
smoke.

The trouble with so many of the physical-culture devotees is that they
tire out the soul in trying to serve it. I am inclined to believe that
the beneficent effects of the regular quarter-hour's exercise before
breakfast, is more than offset by the mental wear and tear involved in
getting out of bed fifteen minutes earlier than one otherwise would.
Some one has calculated that the amount of moral resolution expended in
New York City every winter day in getting up to take one's cold bath
would be enough to decide a dozen municipal elections in favour of the