GREAT MEN'S BODIES
While a student at Amherst, offered ten dollars to deliver a lecture at Brattleboro, Vermont, he walked there, lectured, and walked back, covering about one hundred and fifty miles in the tramp. His wife, son, and son-in-law. Rev. Dr. Scoville, in his biography, say: "In his younger days his farming and gardening experiences were intimately associated with hard physical work." Lewis Tappan says of him while at college: "He joined a club of eight, who boarded a mile from college, that the going and returning from their meals might give them six miles of exercise a day. This was done in part to save expense, board being cheaper at that distance from the village. He also walked from college to Boston, more than one hundred miles, for the same reason."
Look at the make of the man. No one who ever saw him soon forgot the great bead; the sixteen-and-a-half-inch neck (see page 203); the massive shoulders; the capacious chest; the stalwart legs; the fresh, blooming complexion; the double set of splendid teeth; the powerful action; the exhaustless vitality of this grandfather of Henry Ward Beecher the Second—the latter one of the most renowned foot-ball players in the annals of American great athletic contests. And he came honestly by his mighty wealth of vigor. For in speaking of his ancestors his biographers say: "Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability, there was one feature in which the men whom we have described markedly excelled—namely, in physical strength. The standard of measurement was peculiar in those early days, and may not be as well understood by us; but, even now, conveys the idea of great stalwartness. David (Henry Ward's grandfather), it was said, could lift a barrel of cider, and carry it into the
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