yesterday, you did your four miles out, on the Northern turnpike, and
returned splashed to the waist; and yesterday you walked three miles
out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day
the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to
remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the
Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the Gymnasium.

Chess may be all very well to tax with tough problems a brain otherwise
inert, to vary a monotonous day with small events, to keep one awake
during a sleepy evening, and to arouse a whole family next morning
for the adjustment over the breakfast-table of that momentous
state-question, whether the red king should have castled at the fiftieth
move or not till the fifty-first. But for an average American man, who
leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace
of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders, utterly
exhausted in the daily effort to put ten dollars more of distance
between his posterity and the poor-house,--for such a one to kindle up
afresh after office-hours for a complicated chess-problem seems much as
if a wood-sawyer, worn out with his week's work, should decide to order
in his saw-horse on Saturday evening, and saw for fun. Surely we have
little enough recreation at any rate, and, pray, let us make that little
un-intellectual. True, something can be said in favor of chess--for
instance, that no money can be made out of it, and that it is so far
profitable to us overworked Americans: but even this is not enough. For
this once, lock your brains into your safe, at nightfall, with your
other valuables; don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the
Gymnasium.

Ten leaps up a steep, worn-out stairway, through a blind entry to
another stairway, and yet another, and we emerge suddenly upon the floor