Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/527

 Mr. Sullivan, in his Familiar Characters (1834), says: "The following are recollections of Washington derived from repeated opportunities of seeing him during the last three years of his life. He was over six feet in stature, of strong, bony, muscular frame, with fulness of covering, well formed and straight. At the age of sixty-five time had done nothing towards bending him out of his natural erectness."

Look over all the men whom you have ever known, or of whom you have ever heard, in private or in public, obscure or famous. Yes, blacksmiths, athletes, and all you like; put in Adirondack guides, too, and say which of them, on the whole, was —a better all-round man—physically than Washington. Bancroft says: "Few equalled him in strength of arm, or power of endurance"; and among the sixty thousand men of the Continental Army there must have been hundreds of picked men of rare strength and lasting power—out-door men as well as he—more, relatively to population, than this country has ever seen since. For the work of nearly all of them, at clearing land; at farming; hunting; fishing; surveying; felling forests; opening up new territory; and long experience in Indian warfare; with simple habits and frugal living, had built a hardy, splendid race; fit founders of a mighty nation. Yet, of all these, the famous historian says, "Few equalled him in strength of arm or power of endurance."

Sandow is stronger in his arms. But for endurance; striding through forests; over hill and mountain; fording streams; and on all variety of ground; from early dawn to nightfall; ceaselessly trailing the dusky red-man to his lair; nothing in Sandow's record shows that