When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form.  I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew older.  I dropped the wrestling earliest.  When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week.  Incidentally I may mention that his presence caused me a difficulty with the Comptroller, who refused to audit a bill I put in for a wrestling-mat, explaining that I could have a billiard-table, billiards being recognized as a proper Gubernatorial amusement, but that a wrestling-mat symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted.  The middleweight champion was of course so much better than I was that he could not only take care of himself but of me too and see that I was not hurt—­for wrestling is a much more violent amusement than boxing.  But after a couple of months he had to go away, and he left as a substitute a good-humored, stalwart professional oarsman.  The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling.  He could not even take care of himself, not to speak of me.  By the end of our second afternoon one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my short ribs badly damaged, and my left shoulder-blade so nearly shoved out of place that it creaked.  He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought we would “vote the war a failure” and abandon wrestling.  After that I took up boxing again.  While President I used to box with some of the aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood.  After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood-vessels.  Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot.  Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing.  I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.

When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling.  A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter, the son of one of my old boxing teachers.  For several weeks I had him come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for half an hour.  Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a letter of woe from him from the jail.  I found that he was by profession a burglar, and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter moments, or when business was slack.