Charles Page Bryan,
former ambassador to Japan, died in Washington
of heart failure at
the age of sixty-one.
Judge Arthur E. Burr,
Judge of Probate for Suffolk County, dropped
dead in the court-house
at the age of forty-eight.
Hiram Merrick Kirk,
Municipal Court Justice, New York, died in the
forty-seventh year of
his age.
Lieut. William
T. Gleason dropped dead in the railroad station,
Salt Lake City, as he
stepped from a railroad train, at the age of
forty.
Indeed, it is not only the men of military age who
drop off under this strain, but the very vital strong
men behind the lines.
It is an extraordinary thing that the people in this
country, many of them coming from the most vigorous
ancestry, should be willing to compress all their
athletic enthusiasm into a very small period of their
school and college life, and then to forget to take
any exercise (except vicariously) until warned, sometime
after forty, that Nature will exact a price for such
folly. It is certainly a puzzle to understand
how men can willingly slip into fatness and flabbiness
or nervous indigestion, forget entirely what a pleasure
physical vigor is, fold their hands contentedly, with
the statement that they haven’t time for physical
culture, and so, gradually, by way of the motor-car
and the dinner-table, slide into physical decadence
and a morbid condition of mind and body. And
yet three or four hours a week, less than an hour a
day, with the assistance of fresh air and water, and
within a sixty-or ninety-day period, will start these
people on the road to recovered health and vigor.
All that is necessary is to get the proper action of
the lungs, of the heart, and of the skin, and, finally,
of the digestion; then the results will follow fast.
The first time a good conservative New England business
or professional man, who has worked hard all his life
and who has attained a commanding position in the
community, determines to break away and take a vacation
in the winter—a thing he has heard about
and sometimes wondered how other people could manage
to do it—he meets with the surprise of his
life. After boarding a train and traveling for
twenty-four hours toward the South and sunshine, he
begins to lose a little the feeling that he is playing
“hookey” and is liable to be dragged home
and birched. But he does wonder a little whether
he won’t have hard work in finding somebody
to play with him. When, however, he disembarks
from his train at his destination—we will
say Pinehurst—he has already begun to realize,
through noting the other bags of golf-clubs on the
train, that possibly he will be able to get some partners.
When he arrives at the hotel, although it is early
breakfast-time, he is astounded at the number of people
there, and he is inclined to think that he has happened
upon an unusual week or that this is the one place
in the South where golfers congregate.
