Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/146

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HOW TO GET STRONG

match or boatrace; or the coming one;—but doing no work in either.

If six hours a day of real study put splendid Miss Fawcett ahead of every man in great Cambridge University; and she found two whole hours each day for hard athletic work besides; just why should not the average student master his day's ordinary studies in six hours? Door-locked hours, though, where no one else could, upon any pretext get into his room; nor any other idea creep into his mind than those of what he was at. This is the way a real student is made. This is the way the present Lord Chief Justice of England has reached his lofty eminence. An exact schedule of the real way that each minute of a student's waking-hours is spent, would be a revelation often even more suggestive and startling than Franklin's was of his moral life during one short week. The avenues of work for men who mean to help themselves were never so many as to-day. Every college has a steadily increasing number of such men. If, in the larger ones, say twenty fitted themselves to aid the Physical Director; and, supervised by him, to lead the classes; then led them with the snap and vim that the best football captains of Harvard and Yale; Pennsylvania and Cornell; Princeton and Columbia; lead their men on the field of battle; they would do valuable service—easily worth enough to justify their alum-mater in annually receipting their term-bills; and once it became known that that college was thoroughly officered in this field, swelling its ranks in a very gratifying manner.

Nor are the gymnasiums of our cities and towns much better off. Of course his own master, the boy or man who comes to use one finds at once the same things wanting as does the student in the college gymnasium.

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