r of
Indian clubs, or wall exercisers, or a weight machine, or, perhaps, merely
buy a book of "exercises without apparatus," and make up their minds to
take their exercises regularly every morning. At first they attack the
task with great enthusiasm--but it is still a task. Perhaps marked
improvement is shown. They feel much better. They push out their chests
and tell their friends how they get up, take a cold bath every morning,
and then take ten or fifteen or twenty minutes of rapid calisthenics. In a
righteous glow, they relate how it shakes them up and makes their blood
course through their veins; how they breathe deeply; how the process
clears out their heads; and how much better they feel They wind up: "You
ought to do it, too, old man; it would make you young again."

By and by, however, to stand gazing blankly at the wall of a bathroom, or
out of the window of a bed-chamber, and put your arms up five times and
then straight forward five times, then repeat five times, etc., etc.,
grows dull. You lose interest You hate the task--you revolt. Even if, by
power of will, you keep it up, you do so under protest. It is a physical
truth that that which is disagreeable is also physically harmful. In order
to be wholesomely nourishing, food must taste good. The same is true in
regard to exercise. There is no very great benefit in exercise which is
drudgery.

WHEN GAMES PALL

To take the "task" element out of exercise, many kinds of games have been
invented--some indoor, some outdoor, some for men of little activity, some
of great strenuousness and even danger. But it requires a particular type
of man or woman to take interest in a game, to play it well and
profitably, as a form of exercise. To enter into a game whole-heartedly,
one must have a keen zest for combat. The man who plays purely for the
sport, and not to win, doesn't win. And the man who doesn't win, loses
interest. Not all men, not even all active men, have this desire to win.
To them a game soon becomes dull--nearly as dull as any other form of
exercise. They do not see that they are any further ahead in anything
worth while simply because they have knocked a golf ball about more
skilfully--or luckily--than some other fellow, or pulled a little stronger
oar than their opponents. There are plenty of men to whom it is
humiliating to be beaten, who are not good losers, and because they are
not good losers they are not very often winners. Such men do not really