The Arizona sentinel., 1888-03-10
NUMBER 15.

SeIlIhS Ot- FlJuS dance It Is apt to
 be an indoor boy who falls a prey to
 this saint and the country lad seldom
 gets into his clutches.
 There is another kind of boy who
 should live out-of-doors. He is the
 timid, emotional, merely nervous boy,
 apt to be. labeled "girl-boy."' Fine temperaments fall to these lads often,
 and none are moro easily misunder- stood. The fellow will not fight; all risks appal him. If in the water, he likes to feel bottom. He has a good chance of going to pieces early; but if he lives he comes to something. and only needed kindly help to have given him in youth the sturdiness he misses so much in later life.
 I will recall two such fellows. We used to try to make them fight one an- other. It was like a battle between two doves. One grew to be a gallant Major-General in our great war, and the other became resolute and fear less guerilla soldier in the widest | fighting on the Kansas line in that great strife.
 What did Wordsworth mean about the child being the father of the man?" Character is often question of health. Out-of-doors is great steadier of nerves, and these lads should get it early and in large doses. If wars were fought indoors, every | body would run away at once.
 rode once through the Yellowstone and across Montana in days when Sit ting Bull was name of fear, and the common, daily risks of travel were se- rious enough. A bad ford was our first experience, and my saddle turned an hour later on rocky path in canyon eight hundred feet deep. decline to say how scared I was; but week later we were all of Us more or less indiffer- ent to danger. It was worth while to go into the woods once a year to get made oyer again in this fashion, and "kind of feel yourself persimmoned up a bit," as my guide Dan Harrington used to say, when We fioated together down the swift Allegash.
 Among the indoor boys are often good scholars, who lead their classes, and at college take honors, and then some fine day merely stop living for want of good stomachs or sound hearts. 1t seems as if some of them were wound up to run just so long and no longer.
 But suppose that they go through, and come to the bar, or get to the mo- bier position of physician, and are looked to as the successes of the future. Then something happens, and the man ceases to live. Meanwhile some young scamp who spent his youth in the man. ufacture of legs, and took honors at baseball, picks up the peach the other fellow let fall, and goes on comfortably munching it, with health for a partner, having illustrated the fact that life is essential to success.
 What I want to say to the boy who merely studies or reads, and does not also play, is that plenty of men win in life who never did much with their heads in youth; but, that, as rule, the great winners in the contest of man. hood must have healthy bodies, and that youth is the season for play.
 Very often it Is net the boys fault that he has no outdoor life and no taste for it. The father, lucky mer- chant or manufacturer, proud of a clever lad, sets him to work early, and sees with joy his eager ambition Col legc life the father looks upon as time lost, as four years given to games and the learning of what makes no man materially richer. At last, years after, the lad grown old, and broken in the dull monotony of successful trade. comes to me or to some one and says: 'I an rich, l am wretched, what shall I do?''
 answer: "Go and shoot ducks, lure trout, kill salmon, ride horse." He has neither vigor nor enterprise to do any of these things. As to travel and pictures, books and music, he lacketh custom of liking. He has been forty years in trade-prison, and being driven out of a sudden, knows not what to do. The gentle art of being pleasantly idle, he can never know. l have not yet learned what to say to that man--S. Weir Mitchell, H. D.. is TOuth's Cont 71nniOu