when the presence of several others is tightening it, is mere personal flattening and the wiping out of features. The tendency of this gentle exercise to produce baldness has not hitherto been taken into account by the compilers of medical essays, but it must form an enormous factor in the total result. You may observe the crowd come out visibly balder than it went in, just on the spots where the friction with the canvas acts.
There will probably be another obstacle before the final run in—perhaps a row of barrels, minus the ends, suspended at a height of three or four feet by ropes lashed about them. Here is great fun. Every man must get through one of these barrels as best he can—alighting on hands or nose, or both, as Fate may direct, before rising to finish the race. To get through a swinging barrel is none too easy a job, as the gentle reader may test for himself, if so minded.
Swinging barrels.
To begin with, the thing is unstable, tilting fore and aft at a touch, and swinging in every direction. This makes it difficult to raise oneself into it at all, and doubly difficult to wriggle through, once the head and trunk are in. Half-way through, the victim presents a helpless and tortoise-like appearance, making mad efforts to throw his hinder half sufficiently high to cause him to fall out headforemost. Once he has been fortunate enough to alight on his hands and save his nose, the smart practitioner does not waste time in a merely comic attempt to kick and wriggle himself clear of the barrel, but makes three or four steps forward upon his hands, when his feet fall quietly to the ground behind and he rises, top-end uppermost, to run. The man who, resting on his hands, tries the kick-and-wriggle plan, even if he succeed at all, only falls in a confused heap, with his head at the bottom of the pile. Then, when he rises, he is apt to cause hilarious applause by bolting off in some utterly insane direction, quite away from the finish; for several seconds' struggle in a barrel liable to spin round, followed by a miscellaneous tumble head-downward, never improves a man's topography, and his first impulse is to rush straight ahead.
An improvement of some kind is frequently introduced into the barrel business; an improvement, that is to say, from the point of view of the unsympathetic onlooker; for any improvement in an obstacle race always takes the form of some new persecution of the competitors. One such improvement was introduced at the sports held in connection with the Manchester Jubilee celebration. The barrels, usually empty, were stuffed tightly with a fearful mixture of paper, tow, cotton-waste, and soot. To fight one's way blindly through paper, tow, and cotton-waste in a wobbling barrel is a worse thing than to do the same through the empty article; but when soot is added in generous quantities then is the bitterness of the obstacle race seen indeed, and felt, and tasted. The gentleman who invented this horrible preparation holds a most respectable position in Manchester, and has probably now repented, wherefore his name shall not be mentioned; but a few hundred years ago he might have commanded an immense salary as a judicial torture-merchant and witch-baiter. In this particular race itself one competitor was especially unlucky. He was far and away the best of the crowd, had come out triumphantly ahead at all the previous obstacles, and
