HOW TO GET STRONG
the light-house, you are slowly, silently, but with fatal certainty, undermining the structure itself; so that, just when you want it, and want it most; and your trained mind would be a beacon-light on some broad, useful sea; and you one of the honor-men of your time; the first storm of privation, hardship, or suffering that comes along will crash it all to pieces—is there not a lesson for you in the examples of these renowned men; mighty accomplishes in their various fields of action—and a lesson of great moment? Never, since the world began, was the art of body-building so well understood as it is now. Your lacks; your weakness; your probable length of life, can be gauged with a certainty well-nigh unerring. You can be told how far you are ahead of your finish; about how long you will last, if you take no more care of your body, and do nothing more to make it a good body, than you are doing now. Able, brilliant, surpassingly useful and great man even as you may make, if your best hopes are realized; you will scarcely claim to have in you the making of a better man than some, at least, of these illustrious ones. Yet they by chance, necessity, or choice, or by some opulence of native outfit, had or got an unusual store of vitality; and they learned how to keep it; and that if they did not use the means they would lose it. And so they used the means. For they were wide awake to the need of it and to their helplessness without it.
And which part of their education was a more paying investment? Cut out of Commodore Vanderbilt's life that training on the farm and on the water; of Cæsar's that ceaseless go-as-you-please race across Gaul, and over the Alps, again and again, back and forth, for ten long years; out of Washington's those priceless years of endless foot-work, all over Virginia
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