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Updated: September 27, 2025
Teachers of experience, riding masters, dancing masters, musicians, artists, gymnasts, will unite in telling you that unless a pupil's mental qualities be rather extraordinary, it is more difficult to impart knowledge at a second lesson than at the first, simply because the pupil gives less attention, expecting his muscles to work mechanically.
Except for the comparative infrequency of the more bestial types of men and women, Judaea has always been a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences," its gymnasts and money-lenders, its scholars and stockbrokers, its musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints, publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors, foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank.
The professional athletes and gymnasts are exercised at a tender age under male or female trainers, who employ the most approved methods of limbering and quickening and strengthening and toughening their incipient champions, to whom, though well fed, sleep is jealously allowanced and intoxicating drinks absolutely forbidden.
Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner.
The jugglers tossed them in the air, threw them like shuttlecocks with wooden battledores, and yet they kept on spinning; they put them into their pockets, and took them out still whirling as before. It is useless to describe the astonishing performances of the acrobats and gymnasts. The turning on ladders, poles, balls, barrels, etc., was executed with wonderful precision.
I found what many other gymnasts will find, that main strength, by which I mean the strength of the truckman and the porter, cannot be acquired in the ordinary exercises of the gymnasium. Returning home, I began the study of anatomy and physiology, and in the autumn of 1854 entered the Harvard Medical School.
Until within a few years, American skill has added nothing to these, except through the medium of the circus; but the present revival of athletic exercises is rapidly placing American gymnasts in advance of the Turners, both in the feats performed and in the style of doing them.
I must, however, confess that I felt all my anger melting away when I saw the skill and coolness of the young acrobat. Certainly, Sumichrast appealed to my own reminiscences, and offered to lay me a wager that I had climbed many a poplar without the advantage of such superintendence as l'Encuerado's. At last the two gymnasts reached the lowest branches, and I breathed more freely.
A matter of twenty kilometres was a mere trifle for infantry troopers. They walked as lightly as gymnasts, under a clear sky, through the fields, guided by the lights in the farmhouses, and at nine o'clock, having passed the frontier, they stumbled upon a post of Cossacks ambuscaded behind a hedge!
In the realm of gymnasts, jugglers, circus-riders, dancers in which Andrew had thence found his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who travelled around with Sterne and Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and the Bible, as the only books of his permanent library.
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