Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/163

138 Remember that the largest vein in your body is open at one end; and it is not filled with blood, but air,—your wind-pipe.

It invites disease to fill your lungs with bad air, when you breathe heavily under exercise, inhaling all the floating threads and dust of a closed room. This open vein makes a breathing man part of the outer world; the atmosphere is his bellows. This is why we ought to love and value the country, and hate the city. We are truly and actually part of the place we live in: its life enters with every inspiration into our lives. We are one with the reeking streets; with the foul exhalations of bar-rooms, with their stale drinks and hideous spittoons; of smoke-filled cars; of crowded halls; and, again, we are one with the fresh morning air of the fields; with the balsam of the strong and beautiful pines; with the sweet breathings of cattle; with the wholesome smell of the fresh-dug earth; with the fragrance of the meadows and the hedges and the trees; with the sound-washed atmosphere of the sparkling river.

Even in a physical sense, the word of the poet is true: "He who has Nature for a companion must, in some sense, be ennobled by the intercourse."

"You will find," says St. Bernard, "something far greater in the woods than you will find