Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/88

 attempt to keep up with the new decisions every year, even in his own State; what between court-work; the preparation of his cases; drawing papers, consultation, correspondence; and the other matters which fill up the daily round of the lawyer in active practice; that reading will have to be done out of office-hours often, or not done at all. Even in his evenings his business is too pressing to allow any time for reading. Here, then, is a man who is in serious danger of being cut off from that rest and recreation which most other men can have. The long, steady strain, day and evening, often breaks him down; where an hour's active exercise daily on the road or on the water, with his business for the time scrupulously forgotten; together with from a quarter to half an hour, on rising and retiring, in strengthening his arms and chest, would have kept him as tough and fresh as they did Bryant, not simply up to sixty, or even seventy, but clear up to his eighty-fourth year; or Gladstone to his eighty-eighth. Every lawyer who has been in active practice in any of our large cities for a dozen years can point to members of his Bar who have either broken clean down, and gone to a premature grave from neglecting their bodily health, or who are now far on the road in that same direction. This happens, notwithstanding the fact that in many places the courts do not sit once during the whole summer; and lawyers can hence get longer vacations, and go farther from home than most men.

Let any one read the life of Rufus Choate, and say whether there was any need of his dying an old man at sixty. He started not with a weak body, but one decidedly strong. But so little care did he take of it that, as he himself well put it, "latterly he hadn't much of any constitution, but simply lived under the by-laws."