GREAT MEN'S BODIES
there one day; a master in the art of choosing men for strength, speed, stay, and fitness for arduous struggle combined; and asked him what he thought of him. He looked at the picture long and earnestly. Again we asked the verdict. He said: "That's the best-built man I ever saw!" And he has seen the best athletes that Cornell, Harvard and Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania have ever turned out; not a few of the best of Oxford and Cambridge as well, and about all of America's leading professional oars, including Hanlan, Courtney, and the three famed families of professionals— the Wards, the Biglins, and the Ten Eycks. And not only were Washington's legs almost massive, yet with not even a faint suggestion of fat, or of anything but clear spring and lifting-power; and Custis says that "Washington's powers were chiefly in his limbs"; but he adds, "His frame was of equal breadth from the shoulders to the hips." Nothing more significant than this occurs in any description. It means power, precisely where one kind of athlete, the highest kind, the strongest man, wants it—namely, the wrestler. There never was, there never will he, a great wrestler weak in the sides. Power must be there, or he who has it will throw him. But was Washington a wrestler? The rector of his parish, Rev. Mr. Weems, has just answered that. One would think that all day, tramping through forest, with gun, and axe, and theodolite, surveying for Lord Fairfax, would entitle a youth of seventeen or eighteen to sit down when evening came, and take a rest. But not so Washington, with seven such big, good men staring him in the face. He must have a fall out of them; or they should out of him. Often he went down; for those sons of Titan, tugging and twisting,
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