Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-10-27
SOUND MINDS AND BODIES.
The Old Maxim Called in Question-what
 Healthy Invalid" May Do.

The old Maxim Called in ouestion-what
 Healthy Invalid" May Do.
 It is serious question whether, in these day of health lifts, rowing machines, chest weights and bean bags, rather exaggerated ideas are not held out to the public as to the spiritual benefits to be confidently relied on from the diligent use of these. The old maxim, "a sound mind in sound body" is pretty severely put to its trumps when it has to maintain it's dignity against practical illustrations.
 Of course, the old Greeks and Romans, or whoever invented the saw originally, merely meant that, if a man only had a sound mind, he could do great deal more with it if it were in 0 sound body. The modern bean bag professors, however, can never content themselves with so moderate a statement as this. Tone up your muscular system, they insist, and forthwith the whole Sermon on the Mount will enter in and take possession of the soul. Their favorite illustration is taken from the goings on of the baby. Who ever knew baby, they say, that nurses well and sleeps well, to fret and cry? We'll that is simply because he is baby, little animal, with few physical wants. Once satisfy these, and the baby does not know enough to ask for anything more.
 But grown man is not baby He may be strong enough to digest food that would distress an ostrich, to sleep like a hibernating bear and to tramp forty miles on a stretch, and still be moody, morose, discontented and querulous fellow. His mind cannot di- gest the tough experiences of life, and his irritable spirit never gets the mental sleep and refreshment of trust and peace in a higher power. One good healthy invalid like Robert Louis Stevenson. with a sound .N,yr,.I l1%- ~f I~Ir- more brace and invigoration ill him than scores of athletes who have sought their sole spiritual instruction from dumb bells and rowing machines With quarter of lung he breathes in more tonic mountain air than they with lungs like the bellows of a forging shop. No man can abolish his ancestors. If they bequeathed him dyspepsia, consump- tion or nervous exhaustion he will have to fight it out on that line. But let him only say: "1 mean to make a small capital win a big fortune," and ten to one he will get more genuine satisfaction and profit out of life than thousands who coIitemptuously dis miss him as not having body enough to set up peanut stand on.
 The naked fact is that sound men and horses are about equally rare. How to make l the spawned and wind galled capable of prancing and caracoling to the best advant= age, is the practical question; and just here is where the healthy iuvalids have their blessed mission in the world. A anere physi- cal thread of a man like Robert Louis Stevenson, with his admiration for stout, old English admirals and heroes of every type, and who, while perfectly entitled to swathe himself in fiannels and drink catnip tea, hates the whole race of winners and self cod dlers, touches the viking nerve in every reader of his books who has sense of shame enough in him to blush where he ought to blush. All over the land is the same story repeated. If half the great, hulking fellows, who estimate the health of their minds by the vigor of their bodies, would now and then desert their rowing machines and put themselves under the spell of the sweetness, cheer and faith of some frail woman tied up in hard knot with rheumatism, they would feel that, with half the same amount of spirit to the square inch of flesh, they ought to be able to shoulder whole Alps of obsta- cles, instead of whining over mole hills Boston Herald