The Patient Observer and His Friends

ntempt for myself. Why, for instance, should every system of gymnastics require that a man place himself in the most ridiculous and unnatural postures? A stout, middle-aged man who struggle

yes. When he throws his arms back he hits the gas jet. Harrington's young son, who insists on being present during the ordeal, believes that the entire performance is intended for his amusement, and laughs immoderately. I cannot blame him. Morning exerci

then held it in my left hand for half a minute. I know of one man who skipped the rope one hundred times every morning. Within four months he had lost three and a half pounds, and driven the family in the flat below into nervous prostration. I have even been told that there are systems of exercise which show how physical perfection may be attained by scientifically manipulating, for fifteen minutes every day, a couple of fountain pens and a paper

ills they have saved; they will represent themselves as being in the most incredibly perfect health. I know one sober, intelligent business-man who not only habitually understates, by ten degrees, the temperature of his morning tub, but gives an altogether distorted impression of the alacrity with which he leaps into his bath every morning, and the reluctance with which he leaves it. This same man asserts that he can now walk from the Chambers Stree

rs 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

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

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 decent candidate, or to send fifty grafting legislators to jail for an average term of three and a half years. The same specialist has worked out t

aken root and prospered in catacombs. Great poems have been written in stuffy garrets. Great orations have been spoken before sweating crowds in the foul air of overheated legislative chambers. Lovers are said to be fond of dark corners and out-of-the-way places. It is not by accident that children, said to be the