er that a decent
respect for the laws of good sportsmanship requires one to keep in as
hard condition as possible for the hundred-yard dash called Life. Such
a regimen pays thousands of per cent. in yearly dividends. It allows
one to live in an almost continual state of exaltation rather like
that which the sprinter enjoys when, after months of flawless
preparation, he hurls himself through space like some winged creature
too much in love with the earth to leave it; while every drop of his
tingling blood makes him conscious of endless reserves of vitality.

Tingling blood is a reagent which is apt to transmute all things into
joy--even sorrow itself. I wonder if any one seriously doubts that it
was just this which was giving Browning's young David such a glorious
time of it when he broke into that jubilant war-whoop about "our
manhood's prime vigor" and "the wild joys of living."

The physical variety of exuberance, once won, makes easy the winning
of the mental variety. This, when it is almost isolated from the other
kinds, is what you enjoy when you soar easily along over the world of
abstract thought, or drink delight of battle with your intellectual
peers, or follow with full understanding the phonographic version of
some mighty, four-part fugue. To attain this means work. But if your
body is shouting for joy over the mere act of living, mental
calisthenics no longer appear so impossibly irksome. And anyway, the
discipline of your physical training has induced your will to put up
with a good deal of irksomeness. This is partly because its eye is
fixed on something beyond the far-off, divine event of achieving
concentration on one subject for five minutes without allowing the
mind to wander from it more than twenty-five times. That something is
a keenness of perception which makes any given fragment of nature or
human nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace,
endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery--with
possibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For the
Auto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get something
out of nothing.

At this stage of your development you will probably discover in
yourself enough mental adroitness and power of concentration to enable
you to weed discordant thoughts out of the mind. As you wander through
your mental pleasure-grounds, whenever you come upon an ugly intruder
of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as
fe