HOW TO GET STRONG
bies; and looks about for something else to do. He finds no other class of fellows working with any vim, save those eager to show well as gymnasts. He falls in with these, takes nearly as much work the first day as they do, which is ten times too much for him, quite out of condition as he is. He becomes sore all over for two or three days; has no special ambition, after all, to be a gymnast; and, ten to one, throws up the whole business disgusted.
In the warmer months even the oarsmen and ball-players work out-of-doors; and, except a little brush by the new-comers during the first month or so, he finds the place almost deserted. At the start there was nobody to receive him, place him, and to encourage and invite him on. If naturally persistent, and he sticks to it a while; he gropes about in a desultory way; now trying this and now that; until, neither increasing in size nor strength so fast as he had expected, he prefers to spend his spare hours in more attractive fields; and so drops the gymnasium, as many have done before him.
He has no more given it a fair trial than he would have his chemistry had he treated it in the same way. It is not his fault, for he knew no better. The whole method of bringing up most American boys does almost nothing to fit the average boy for even the simpler work of the gymnasium, let alone its more advanced steps. Often, in the university-gymnasium, you will see fellows actually so weak in the arms that they can hardly get up in the parallel bars, and rest their weight on their hands alone; much less go through them clear to the other end, or climb a rope, or pole, or ladder, hand-over-hand, half-way to the ceiling. It is a suggestive commentary on the way these establishments are conducted
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