a spring-board, an old mattress to break the fall, a few settees where
sweethearts and wives may sit with their knitting as spectators, and
there is a _Turnhalle_ complete,--to be henceforward filled, two or
three nights in every week, with cheery German faces, jokes, laughs,
gutturals, and gambols.

But this suggests that you are being kept too long in the anteroom. Let
me act as cicerone through this modest gymnastic hall of ours. You will
better appreciate all this oddly shaped apparatus, if I tell you in
advance, as a connoisseur does in his picture-gallery, precisely what
you are expected to think of each particular article.

You will notice, however, that a part of the gymnastic class are
exercising without apparatus, in a series of rather grotesque movements
which supple and prepare the body for more muscular feats: these are
calisthenic exercises. Such are being at last introduced, thanks to Dr.
Lewis and others, into our common schools. At the word of command, as
swiftly as a conjuror twists his puzzle-paper, these living forms are
shifted from one odd resemblance to another, at which it is quite lawful
to laugh, especially if those laugh who win. A series of windmills,--a
group of inflated balloons,--a flock of geese all asleep on one leg,--a
circle of ballet-dancers, just poised to begin,--a band of patriots
just kneeling to take an oath upon their country's altar,--a senate of
tailors,--a file of soldiers,--a whole parish of Shaker worshippers,--a
Japanese embassy performing _Ko-tow_: these all in turn come like
shadows,--so depart. This complicated attitudinizing forms the
preliminary to the gymnastic hour. But now come and look at some of the
apparatus.

Here is a row of Indian clubs, or sceptres, as they are sometimes