Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/99

 it there say for thirty seconds! This is good work to give the stomach a little more room in which to play.

And now comes the important part. If the busiest Englishmen somehow find time in the late afternoon for their daily "constitutional"; why cannot Americans do the same thing? The field of healthful recreation was never so large as now. A man of moderate means may walk; row; ride horse or wheel; bowl; play tennis; hockey; baseball; football; hand-ball; raquet; can swim; skate, and paddle his canoe; and, if he likes sharper work, can box, fence, run or wrestle; or have anything he will of field-sports or track-athletics. And two more doors have opened to us in recent years, though one of them is generations old—namely golf and cycling. Perhaps you do not sleep well. As in most persons the heart beats, and so lifts its load, about ten times less a minute while they sleep than when they are awake; or six hundred times in an hour; or about five thousand times in the night; it will be seen that any inroad into sleep, especially for many nights in a year, cuts down the rest the heart should have, and so overworks it, and makes it wear out early; and also its owner. If you do not sleep your full quota,—that which is best for you—read this from the London Hospital, quoted in the New York Evening Post of October 5, 1894:

".—A writer in the Scotsman, regretting the Marquis of Salisbury's insomnia, says: 'Would that the noble leader of the Conservative Party would take a three-months' course of golf! Golf is the game for the exhausted brain-worker at any stage of his life. No Junior is too young, no Senior too old to learn it; to learn it and enjoy it. The proof of the pudding is the eating. On the golf-links of St. Andrews the man of seventy looks fifty; and the man of fifty has the appearance of thirty-five. The chief reasons for this are that both