Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/175

150 dull eyes, like all the other querulous, ill-tempered and sour-faced maids and matrons who crowd the horse-cars, and worry and abuse the poor, tired girls in the stores.

Better burn all the school-books and school-houses in America than go on another half century congesting the children's brains with memory-cramming, blinding their sight and crooking their backs with constant study.

Give us a rest! Give us time to play while we are children; for, God knows, we shall have work enough, and too much, as men and women.

The whole system of American life, from childhood to old age, might have been invented by a distorted mind, bent on degrading the natural beauty of the human form, and producing a race of ugly, weak, near-sighted, selfish, vain, prejudiced, ill-tempered, and unwholesome men and women.

"A drunkard is always a liar," says an authority; and he might have added that a weak, dyspeptic, devitalized man or woman is apt, if not certain, to be a shirker, a snarler, a sensualist, a sneak, and a coward, or more than one of these.

And to think of the endless, empty talk, talk, talk of the future puling, bald-headed abnormality of the cities! For, with the decay of your real man, surely swells the gaseous self-opinion of