Some girls—­and there are more girls of this type than there are boys—­put in their outdoor life as a stop-gap.  It is inconceivable that this should be true, yet it is true.  Apathetically the students have exercised sixty minutes, considering this minimum quite sufficient.  Not a particle of zest do they reveal in the exercise taken.  They do not seem to know or they do not care that the fields and woods should be full, not only of health and all that goes with it, including success, but also of the best of friends who all have their good points worthy of notice and imitation, in quick leap, cheerful voice and blithe song.  What are sixty minutes in this great outdoor runway?  Not a tithe of the twenty-four hours and at best only half of what the minimum should be.  Exercise should be taken even if nothing else in the school life is.  And I say this advisedly, for health is the basis on which not only the future of the woman’s life must depend but also that of the race.  Good health, the inheritance of it, its maintenance and increase, neither the girl nor her parents can ever hold as too sacred a trust.  That it is a sacred trust the schools are recognizing more and more, and provisions are being made, especially in the public schools, for the defective in health as well as for the strong.  The outdoor school, at first an object that attracted universal attention, is now being taken quite for granted.  Foolish the girl who does not learn to take the outdoor runway for granted, too, and go out to it in high spirits to learn its wisdom, to take part in its joys and to receive its health.

It may be accepted as a new axiom—­the more exercise the less fool.  Strong, able muscles, steady nerves (and let us remember that nerves depend for their tone on the muscular condition), a clean skin open at all its pores and doing its eliminative work thoroughly, and clean strong vitals make up the kind of beauty within the reach of all womanhood, and the physical beauty which she should most desire.  The day is coming when our ideal of what is physically perfect—­not spiritually, for Christianity has carried us beyond anything that Greece ever knew—­will be more like the Greek in its entirety, its emphasis upon the harmony of the whole body.  The body is a mechanism to be exquisitely cared for—­self-running, it is true, and yet in need of intelligent attention.  Think of the care an engineer gives his engine, and it is by no manner of means so wonderfully and so intricately fashioned as these bodies of ours on which our happiness, our working ability, even our very goodness depend.  Health as a safeguard to one’s whole moral being is coming into more and more recognition, and not only as a safeguard but also as a cultivator of all that is best in us spiritually.  There are people very ill, or permanent invalids, whose great victory it is to be among the saints of the earth, but that it is easier to be good when one is well no one will deny.  Every big school has now its class or classes in corrective or medical gymnastics, in which stooping shoulders, ewe necks, curved spines, flat insteps, small waists and narrow chests are rectified as far as possible in the limited hours of the school days.