s in a day, to walk thirty, to run five, or to swim
one, would cost most men among us a fit of illness, and many their
lives. Let any man test his physical condition, we will not say by
sawing his own cord of wood, but by an hour in the gymnasium or at
cricket, and his enfeebled muscular apparatus will groan with rheumatism
for a week. Or let him test the strength of his arms and chest by
raising and lowering himself a few times upon a horizontal bar, or
hanging by the arms to a rope, and he will probably agree with Galen
in pronouncing it _robustum validumque laborem_. Yet so manifestly are
these things within the reach of common constitutions, that a few weeks
or months of judicious practice will renovate his whole system, and the
most vigorous exercise will refresh him like a cold bath.

To a well-regulated frame, mere physical exertion, even for an
uninteresting object, is a great enjoyment, which is, of course,
enhanced by the excitement of games and sports. To almost every man
there is joy in the memory of these things; they are the happiest
associations of his boyhood. It does not occur to him, that he also
might be as happy as a boy, if he lived more like one. What do most men
know of the "wild joys of living," the daily zest and luxury of out-door
existence, in which every healthy boy beside them revels?--skating,
while the orange sky of sunset dies away over the delicate tracery of
gray branches, and the throbbing feet pause in their tingling motion,
and the frosty air is filled with the shrill sound of distant steel,
the resounding of the ice, and the echoes up the hillsides?--sailing,
beating up against a stiff breeze, with the waves thumping under the
bow, as if a dozen sea-gods had laid their heads together to resist
it?--climbing tall trees, where the higher foliage, closing around,
cures the dizziness which began below, and one feels as if he had left a
coward beneath and found a hero above?--the joyous hour of crowded life
in football or cricket?--the gallant glories of riding, and the jubilee
of swimming?

The charm which all have found in Tom Brown's "School Days at Rugby"
lies simply in this healthy boy's-life which it exhibits, and in the
recognition of physical culture, which is so novel to Americans. At
present, boys are annually sent across the Atlantic simply for bodily
training. But efforts after the same thing begin to creep in among
ourselves. A few Normal Schools have gymnasiums (rather neg