body than one can restore a wasted candle by lighting it at the other end.  But by subtracting an hour a day from the present amount of purely intellectual fatigue, and inserting that quantum of bodily fatigue in its place, you begin an immediate change in your conditions of life.  Moreover, the great object is not merely to get well, but to keep well.  The exhaustion of over-work can almost always be cured by a water-cure, or by a voyage, which is a salt-water cure; but the problem is, how to make the whole voyage of life perpetually self-curative.  Without this, there is perpetual dissatisfaction and chronic failure.  Emerson well says, “Each class fixes its eye on the advantages it has not,—­the refined on rude strength, the democrat on birth and breeding.”  This is the aim of the gymnasium, to give to the refined this rude strength, or its better substitute, refined strength.  It is something to secure to the student or the clerk the strong muscles, hearty appetite, and sound sleep of the sailor and the ploughman,—­to enable him, if need be, to out-row the fisherman, and out-run the mountaineer, and lift more than his porter, and to remember head-ache and dyspepsia only as he recalls the primeval whooping-cough of his childhood.  I am one of those who think that the Autocrat rides his hobby of the pavements a little too far; but it is useless to deny, that, within the last few years of gymnasiums and boat-clubs, the city has been gaining on the country, in physical development.  Here in our town we had all the city- and college-boys assembled in July to see the regattas, and all the country-boys in September to see the thousand-dollar base-ball match; and it was impossible to deny, whatever one’s theories, that the physical superiority lay for the time being with the former.

The secret is, that, though the country offers to farmers more oxygen than to anybody in the city, yet not all dwellers in the country are farmers, and even those who are such are suffering from other causes, being usually the very last to receive those lessons of food and clothing and bathing and ventilation which have their origin in cities.  Physical training is not a mechanical, but a vital process:  no bricks without straw; no good physique without good materials and conditions.  The farmer knows, that, to rear a premium colt or calf, he must oversee every morsel that it eats, every motion it makes, every breath it draws,—­must guard against over-work and under-work, cold and heat, wet and dry.  He remembers it for the quadrupeds, but he forgets it for his children, his wife, and himself:  so his cattle deserve a premium, and his family does not.