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Updated: September 27, 2025
Small, dark, Slavonic women, with gaily-colored scarfs around their heads and children in their arms; Poles in shabby coats and astrakhan caps; tall blond Scandinavians, square-jawed, cool-blooded and patient; short, sturdy Italians with felt hats and gay cravats; a handful of pale-brown Siamese jugglers or gymnasts with flat gold-embroidered caps on, and tired, listless faces, melancholy and pallid from cold and seasickness.
The room was full of all sorts and sizes of them, heavy-weights looking ponderous and muscular, feather-weights diminutive but wiry, light-weights, middle-weights, fencers, and gymnasts in scores, some wearing the unmistakable air of the veteran, for whom Aldershot has no mysteries, others nervous, and wishing themselves back again at school. Tony Graham had chosen a corner near the door.
It is sung in a peculiar way; the sound is, as it were, expelled from the chest in a sort of musical ejaculations; and the like, we know, was done by the ancient gymnasts; and is done by the French bakers, in lifting their enormous dough, and by our paviors.
The father, conscious that their bodies, like their minds, are susceptible of indefinite development, in his anxiety takes them to the gymnasium. They find a large room furnished with bars, ladders, and swings. They witness the wonderful performances of accomplished gymnasts and acrobates, admire the brilliant feats; but the girls see no opportunity for themselves. They are nearly right.
On the contrary, I am exceedingly grateful to this class of gymnasts for their noble illustration of the possibilities in one department of physical development. Men, women, and children should be strong, but it should be the strength of grace, flexibility, agility, and endurance; it should not be the strength of a great lifter. I have alluded to the gymnastics of the circus.
"Perez and I signed a contract there," replied Don Alonso, "with a big circus syndicate of New York that had about twenty or thirty companies touring all America. All of us gymnasts, ballet-dancers, ecuyeres, acrobats, pantominists, clowns, contortionists, and strong men travelled in a special train.... The majority were Italians and Frenchmen." "Were there good-looking women, eh?" asked Manuel.
It is impossible that in either there should be the highest physiological conditions; but in the persons of the Hanlon brothers, who are general performers, are found the model gymnasts. They can neither lift great weights nor tie themselves into knots, but they occupy a position between these two extremes.
The girl prepares herself for the former by inflating and over-heating her skirts over the register in the hall-floor; a few minutes' exercise chills the hot drapery what wonder that a morbid bodily sensitiveness follows the insane exposure? No thoughtful person can watch a class of gymnasts, without seeing how extreme and unnatural are many of the attitudes assumed, especially for women.
Such love as hers is perpetual flattery to a man. Her health is positively insolent, and she has thirty-two oriental pearls in lips of coral. Her muzzle that's what she calls the lower part of her face has, as Shakespeare expresses it, the savor of a heifer's nose. She can make a man unhappy. She likes handsome men, strong men, Alexanders, gymnasts, clowns.
Those souls which have partially seen the truth but have been dragged down by the black steed become, according to the amount of Beauty they have seen, philosophers, kings, economists, gymnasts, mystics, poets, journeymen, sophists or tyrants. The vision once seen is never quite forgotten, for it can be recovered by reminiscence, so that by exercise each man can recall some of its glories.
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