ame week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard
and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among
scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and
mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors
McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt.
About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow,
oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of
knowledge on which they row. Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left
foot on the left rib--bend into it, my hearties, bend!--and our craft come
out four lengths ahead.

Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up
the soul. Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white
sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on
toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want
to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with
sky-rockets.

"By the way," I said, "Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more
out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a
cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?"

The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his
spectacles up on his forehead, replied:

Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor
key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as "the
blues." There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of
the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off
fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate
cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or
pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.

In such depressed state no one can afford to sit for an hour. First of all
let him get up and go out of doors. Fresh air, and the faces of cheerful
men, and pleasant women, and frolicsome children, will in fifteen minutes
kill moping. The first moment your friend strikes the keyboard of your soul
it will ring music. A hen might as well try on populous Broadway to hatch
out a feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in
lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you
do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see
toothache, rheumatism and hypo