astonishing in
which I have ever been. It seemed to be drawing the celebrated and the
successful as a magnet might iron, and yet it offered conditions which
one might presume they would be most opposed to. No one here was really
any one, however much he might be outside. Our host was all. He had a
great blazing personality which dominated everybody, and he did not
hesitate to show before one and all that he did so do.

Breakfast here consisted of a cereal, a chop and coffee--plentiful but
very plain, I thought. After breakfast, between eight-thirty and eleven,
we were free to do as we chose: write letters, pack our bags if we were
leaving, do up our laundry to be sent out, read, or merely sit about. At
eleven, or ten-thirty, according to the nature of the exercise, one had
to join a group, either one that was to do the long or short block, as
they were known here, or one that was to ride horseback, all exercises
being so timed that by proper execution one would arrive at the bathroom
door in time to bathe, dress and take ten minutes' rest before luncheon.
These exercises were simple enough in themselves, consisting, as they
did in the case of the long and the short blocks (the long block seven,
the short four miles in length), of our walking, or walking and running
betimes, about or over courses laid up hill and down dale, over or
through unpaved mudroads in many instances, along dry or wet beds of
brooks or streams, and across stony or weedy fields, often still damp
with dew or the spring rains. But in most cases, when people had not
taken any regular exercise for a long time, this was by no means easy.
The first day I thought I should never make it, and I was by no means a
poor walker. Others, the new ones especially, often gave out and had to
be sent for, or came in an hour late to be most severely and
irritatingly ragged by the host. He seemed to all but despise weakness
and had apparently a thousand disagreeable ways of showing it.

"If you want to see what poor bags of mush some people can become," he
once said in regard to some poor specimen who had seemingly had great
difficulty in doing the short block, "look at this. Here comes a man
sent out to do four measly country miles in fifty minutes, and look at
him. You'd think he was going to die. He probably thinks so himself. In
New York he'd do seventeen miles in a night running from barroom to
barroom or one lobster palace to another--that's a good name for them,