HOW TO GET STRONG
And he had it. If you think statesmen need to have weak legs, look at his; his fiery, high-pressure brain, with all its ceaseless activity, did not seriously rob his legs, as any of us would have found out had we gone with him on a fifty-six-mile tramp. You, so satisfied because you have occasionally made a century run on your bike; just try for a change a fifty-six-mile walk in a day; and such fare as you are able to pick up by the way-side; and you will find even crackers and cheese at the finish more delicious than the richest and most toothsome viands you have ever tasted.
"In defiance of nature, which seemed to have unsettled him for any other class of pursuits, Fox was an ardent, a many-sided, and, in some respects, a most accomplished sportsman.… Like all men of his temperament, he shot better after advancing years had taken off the first edge of his keenness. But he did not require a gun to tempt him abroad. He prided himself on his endurance as a pedestrian; and on the steadiness of pace which enabled him, almost infallibly, to calculate the distance that he traversed by the time that he spent over it. The friends of his later life could not please him better than by disputing whether this or that village was nine or eleven miles from St. Anne's Hill, in order to give him an opportunity of solving the problem by a walk. When a lad at Oxford he trudged the fifty-six miles between Hertford and Holland House in the course of a summer day; and only broke the journey for a lunch of bread, cheese, and porter; in payment for which, observing the usual proportion between the market-value of his pleasures and the price that they
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