s by the hands
on the bars, and not very many who cannot walk a few steps upon the
palms, at the first trial. Soon you will learn to swing along these bars
in long surges of motion, forward and backward; to go through them, in
a series of springs from the hand only, without a jerk of the knees; to
turn round and round between them, going forward or backward all the
while; to vault over them and under them in complicated ways; to turn
somersets in them and across them; to roll over and over on them as
a porpoise seems to roll in the sea. Then come the "low-standing"
exercises, the grasshopper style of business; supporting yourself now
with arms not straight, but bent at the elbow, you shall learn to raise
and lower your body and to hold or swing yourself as lightly in that
position as if you had not felt pinioned and paralyzed hopelessly at the
first trial; and whole new systems of muscles shall seem to shoot out
from your shoulder-blades to enable you to do what you could not have
dreamed of doing before. These bars are magical,--they are conduits of
power; you cannot touch them, you cannot rest your weight on them in the
slightest degree, without causing strength to flow into your body as
naturally and irresistibly as water into the aqueduct-pipe when you turn
it on. Do you but give the opportunity, and every pulsation of blood
from your heart is pledged for the rest.

These exercises, and such as these, are among the elementary lessons of
gymnastic training. Practise these thoroughly and patiently, and you
will in time attain evolutions more complicated, and, if you wish, more
perilous. Neglect these, to grasp at random after everything which you
see others doing, and you will fail like a bookkeeper who is weak in
the multiplication-table. The older you begin, the more gradual the
preparation must be. A respectable middle-aged citizen, bent on
improving his _physique_, goes into a gymnasium, and sees slight,
smooth-faced boys going gayly through a series of exercises which show
their bodies to be a triumph, not a drag, and he is assured that the
same might be the case with him. Off goes the coat of our enthusiast and
in he plunges; he gripes a heavy dumb-bell and strains one shoulder,
hauls at a weight-box and strains the other, vaults the bar and bruises
his knee, swings in the rings once or twice till his hand slips and he
falls to the floor. No matter, he thinks the cause demands sacrifices;
but he subsides, for th