as Hamlet that you don't stay
dead. You are. You're really dead now, you know. Move! Move!" and so it
would go until finally the poor thespian, no match for his master and
beset by flying balls, landing upon his neck, ear, stomach, finally gave
up and cried:

"Well, I can't go any faster than I can, can I? I can't do any more than
I can!"

"Ah, go on! Go back into the chorus!" called his host, who now abandoned
him. "Get somebody from the baby class to play marbles with you," and he
called another.

By now, as may well be imagined, I was fairly stirred up as to the
probabilities of the situation. He might call me! The man who was
playing opposite me--a small, decayed person who chose me, I think,
because he knew I was new, innocuous and probably awkward--seemed to
realize my thoughts as well as his own. By lively exercise with me he
was doing his utmost to create an impression of great and valuable
effort here. "Come on, let's play fast so he won't notice us," he said
most pathetically at one point. You would have thought I had known him
all my life.

But he didn't call us--not this morning at any rate. Whether owing to
our efforts or the fact that I at least was too insignificant, too
obscure, we escaped. He did reach me, however, on the fourth or fifth
day, and no spindling failure could have done worse. I was struck and
tripped and pounded until I all but fell prone upon the floor, half
convinced that I was being killed, but I was not. I was merely sent
stumbling and drooping back to the sidelines to recover while he
tortured some one else. But the names he called me! The comments on my
none too smoothly articulated bones--and my alleged mind! As in my
schooldays when, a laggard in the fierce and seemingly malevolent
atmosphere in which I was taught my ABC's, I crept shamefacedly and
beaten from the scene.

It was in the adjoining bathroom, where the host daily personally
superintended the ablutions of his guests, that even more of his
remarkable method was revealed. Here a goodly portion of the force of
his method was his skill in removing any sense of ability, agility,
authority or worth from those with whom he dealt. Apparently to him, in
his strength and energy, they were all children, weaklings, failures,
numbskulls, no matter what they might be in the world outside. They had
no understanding of the most important of their possessions, their
bodies. And here again, even more than in the gymnasium, they w