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 were at the disadvantage of feeling themselves spectacles, for here they were naked.  However grand an osseous, leathery lawyer or judge or doctor or politician or society man may look out in the world addressing a jury or a crowd or walking in some favorite place, glistening in his raiment, here, whiskered, thin of legs, arms and neck, with bulging brow and stripped not only of his gown but everything else this side of his skin—­well, draw your own conclusion.  For after performing certain additional exercises—­one hundred times up on your toes, one hundred times (if you could) squatting to your knees, one hundred times throwing your arms out straight before you from your chest or up from your shoulders or out at right angles, right and left from your body and back to your hips until your fingers touched and the sweat once more ran—­you were then ready to be told (for once in your life) how to swiftly and agilely take a bath.

“Well, now, you’re ready, are you?” this to a noble jurist who, like myself perhaps, had arrived only the day before.  “Come on, now.  Now you have just ten seconds in which to jump under the water and get yourself wet all over, twenty seconds in which to jump out and soap yourself thoroughly, ten seconds in which to get back in again and rinse off all the soap, and twenty seconds in which to rub and dry your skin thoroughly—­now start!”

The distinguished jurist began, but instead of following the advice given him for rapid action huddled himself in a shivering position under the water and stood all but inert despite the previous explanation of the host that the sole method of escaping the weakening influence of cold water was by counteracting it with activity, when it would prove beneficial.