My professor, observing that I would return wet and exhausted
from these long and gloomy expeditions, suggested that this passion for taking exercise was " an English fallacy." " It is," he explained, " a fallacy which is highly dangerous. If at your age you train your body to expect and to minister to these arduous exertions, then you will find when you reach the age of fifty that your body cannot adjust itself to a sedentary life. If, on the other hand, you begin at once to train your body in sedentary habits, then you will pass by easier gradations into later middle age." I was shocked by this perverse, and seemingly immoral, theory. " But," I said to him, " did I not take violent exercise every day, I should become extremely ill." He was amused by this remark, and three days later he asked to dinner four of his university colleagues, each of whom was over sixty years of age. It was a large and sumptuous dinner, and all five of them ate and drank a great deal. My professor asked his colleagues in turn whether ever in their lives they had know- ingly taken any exercise. Each replied in the negative. " And yet," said the professor, turning to me in a glow of triumph, " and yet you would not seriously contend that we five are less active and .alert than any five of your Oxford professors of the same age? " I could make no such con- tention. I was convinced.
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