HOW TO GET STRONG
Horse to Louis Quatorze; or like Hilmar Cura—who had been riding-master to Frederick the Great. He has himself recorded that if he has fallen from his horse once, he must have done so fifty times. Even in later days he broke three of his ribs thus at Varzin. 'Once before,' said Bismarck, 'during the French war, I had a remarkable fall. I was on the road, and we were riding as fast as the horses would go. Suddenly my brother, who was a little in front, heard a frightful crack. It was my head, which had knocked on the road. On another occasion, too, I had such a serious fall from my horse that when the doctor examined my hurts, he said that it was contrary to all professional rules that I had not broken my neck.'"
And besides laying his hand occasionally upon a nation, he seems to have known how to use it when the need arose—not in German, but in American and British fashion—on an individual. For he thus describes his contact with one who tried to pick a quarrel with him: "I was quietly drinking my beer." (The other party, a stranger, had already absorbed his.) "My being so quiet vexed him; so he began to taunt me. I sat still, and that made him only the more angry and spiteful. He went on taunting me louder and louder. I did not wish for a 'row,' but I would not go, lest they" (the stranger's friends) "should think I was afraid. At last his patience seemed exhausted; he came to my table, and threatened to throw the jug of beer into my face; and that was too much for me. I told him he must go, and when he then made a gesture as if to throw it, I gave him one under the chin, so that he measured his length on the floor, smashed the chair and the glass, and went clean to the wall. The hostess came in, and I told her she might make herself quite easy, as I would pay for the
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