HOW TO GET STRONG
can pulpit, and almost upon American platform—she gave him also the inevitable magnificent body.
We have already seen from his pen (page 83) the value he put upon health and the important part it must ever play in all great performances; and in a life of tireless activity in great fields, from the small beginning at Lawrenceburg, at three hundred dollars a year, till, by tongue and pen, he is estimated to have earned and collected in all his life far over a million of dollars; no man knew better than he what a priceless ally health is, and how crippled and helpless he would have been without it. He wrote his grandson—a growing boy at school: "Don't he tempted to give up the wholesome air-bath, the good walk, the skate, the ride every day. It will pay you back over your books by freshness, elasticity, and clearness of mind. I have noticed that lessons which require acuteness and memory both, are best gotten by studying them the last thing before going to bed; and then taking hold again early in the morning.… Take care of health. Learning, in a broken body, is like a sword without a handle; like a load in a broken-wheeled cart; like artillery with no gun-carriage." And at thirty-two he wrote on a fly-leaf of an educational agricultural book, begun January 10, 1845: "It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health; that the industrial and producing interests of society are powerful conservators of morals. Especially do I regard the tillage of the soil as conducive to life, health, morals, and manhood."
And from childhood on he practised what he preached. His brother, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, says: "Ed was a man like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar!"
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