Breakfast here consisted of a cereal, a chop and coffee—­plentiful but very plain, I thought.  After breakfast, between eight-thirty and eleven, we were free to do as we chose:  write letters, pack our bags if we were leaving, do up our laundry to be sent out, read, or merely sit about.  At eleven, or ten-thirty, according to the nature of the exercise, one had to join a group, either one that was to do the long or short block, as they were known here, or one that was to ride horseback, all exercises being so timed that by proper execution one would arrive at the bathroom door in time to bathe, dress and take ten minutes’ rest before luncheon.  These exercises were simple enough in themselves, consisting, as they did in the case of the long and the short blocks (the long block seven, the short four miles in length), of our walking, or walking and running betimes, about or over courses laid up hill and down dale, over or through unpaved mudroads in many instances, along dry or wet beds of brooks or streams, and across stony or weedy fields, often still damp with dew or the spring rains.  But in most cases, when people had not taken any regular exercise for a long time, this was by no means easy.  The first day I thought I should never make it, and I was by no means a poor walker.  Others, the new ones especially, often gave out and had to be sent for, or came in an hour late to be most severely and irritatingly ragged by the host.  He seemed to all but despise weakness and had apparently a thousand disagreeable ways of showing it.

“If you want to see what poor bags of mush some people can become,” he once said in regard to some poor specimen who had seemingly had great difficulty in doing the short block, “look at this.  Here comes a man sent out to do four measly country miles in fifty minutes, and look at him.  You’d think he was going to die.  He probably thinks so himself.  In New York he’d do seventeen miles in a night running from barroom to barroom or one lobster palace to another—­that’s a good name for them, by the way—­and never say a word.  But out here in the country, with plenty of fresh air and a night’s rest and a good breakfast, he can’t even do four miles in fifty minutes!  Think of it!  And he probably thinks of himself as a man—­boasts before his friends, or his wife, anyhow.  Lord!”

A day or two later there arrived here a certain major of the United States Army, a large, broad-chested, rather pompous person of about forty-eight or -nine, who from taking his ease in one sinecure and another had finally reached the place where he was unable to endure certain tests (or he thought so) which were about to be made with a view to retiring certain officers grown fat in the service.  As he explained to Culhane, and the latter was always open and ribald afterward in his comments on those who offered explanations of any kind, his plan was to take the course here in order to be able to make the difficult tests later.