relaxed by indolent habits. No doubt it is aggravating to see some
robust, lazy giant come into the gymnasium for the first time, and by
hereditary muscle shoulder a dumb-bell which all your training has
not taught you to handle. No matter; it is by comparing yourself with
yourself that the estimate is to be made. As the writing-master exhibits
with triumph to each departing pupil the uncouth copy which he wrote
on entering, so it will be enough to you, if you can appreciate your
present powers with your original inabilities. When you first joined the
gymnastic class, you could not climb yonder smooth mast, even with all
your limbs brought into service; now you can do it with your hands
alone. When you came, you could not possibly, when hanging by your hands
to the horizontal bar, raise your feet as high as your head,--nor could
you, with any amount of spring from the ground, curl your body over the
bar itself; now you can hang at arm's length and fling yourself over it
a dozen times in succession. At first, if you lowered yourself with bent
elbows between the parallel bars, you could not by any manoeuvre get up
again, but sank to the ground a hopeless wreck; now you can raise and
lower yourself an indefinite number of times. As for the weights and
clubs and dumb-bells, you feel as if there must be some jugglery about
them,--they have grown so much lighter than they used to be. It is you
who have gained a double set of muscles to every limb; that is all.
Strike out from the shoulder with your clenched hand; once your arm was
loose-jointed and shaky; now it is firm and tense, and begins to feel
like a natural arm. Moreover, strength and suppleness have grown
together; you have not stiffened by becoming stronger, but find yourself
more flexible. When you first came here, you could not touch your
fingers to the ground without bending the knees, and now you can place
your knuckles on the floor; then you could scarcely bend yourself
backward, and now you can lay the back of your head in a chair, or walk,
without crouching forward, under a bar less than three feet from
the ground. You have found, indeed, that almost every feat is done
originally by sheer strength, and then by agility, requiring very little
expenditure of force after the precise motion is hit upon; at first
labor, puffing, and a red face,--afterwards ease and the graces.

To a person who begins after the age of thirty or thereabouts, the
increase of strength an