6.  Providence furnishes materials, but expects that we should work them up ourselves.  The earth must be labored before it gives its increase, and when it is forced into its several products, how many hands must they pass through before they are fit for use.  Manufactures, trade and agriculture, naturally employ more than nineteen parts of the species in twenty; and as for those who are not obliged to labor, by the condition in which they are born, they are more miserable than the rest of mankind, unless they indulge themselves in that voluntary labor which goes by the name of exercise.

7.  My friend Sir Roger hath been an indefatigable man in business of this kind, and has hung several parts of his house with the trophies of his former labors.  The walls of his great hall are covered with the horns of several kinds of deer that he has killed in the chase, which he thinks the most valuable furniture of his house, as they afford him frequent topics of discourse, and show that he has not been idle.

8.  At the lower end of the hall is a large otter’s skin stuffed with hay, which his mother ordered to be hung up in that manner, and the knight looks upon it with great satisfaction, because it seems he was but nine years old when his dog killed it.  A little room adjoining to the hall is a kind of arsenal, filled with guns of several sizes and inventions, with which the knight has made great havoc in the woods, and destroyed many thousands of pheasants, partridges and woodcocks.  His stable-doors are patched with noses that belonged to foxes of the knight’s own hunting down.

9.  Sir Roger shewed me one of them that, for distinction sake, has a brass nail stuck through it, which cost him about fifteen hours riding, carried him, through half a dozen counties, killed him a brace of geldings, and lost about half his dogs.  This the knight looks upon as one of the greatest exploits of his life.

10.  The perverse widow, whom I have given some account of, was the death of several foxes; for Sir Roger has told me, that in the course of his amours he patched the western door of his stable.  Whenever the widow was cruel, the foxes were sure to pay for it.  In proportion as his passion for the widow abated and old age came on, he left off fox-hunting; but a hare is not yet safe that sits within ten miles of his house.

11.  There is no kind of exercise which I would so recommend to my readers of both sexes as that of riding, as there is none which so much conduces to health, and is every way accommodated to the body, according to the idea which I have given of it.  Dr. Sydenham is very lavish in its praise; and if the English reader will see the mechanical effects of it described at length, he may find them in a book published not many years since, under the title of Medicina Gymnastica.

12.  For my own part, when I am in town, for want of these opportunities, I exercise myself an hour every morning upon a dumb bell that is placed in a corner of my room, and pleases me the more because it does everything I require in the most profound silence.  My landlady and her daughters are so well acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room to disturb me whilst I am ringing.