224 SPORT INDEED 



likely place to find it." Waggery on such a serious 

 subject may seem to the reader like fiddling at a 

 funeral. If his mind, however, should be at all per- 

 turbed with fears for the result of my future en- 

 counters with lumbago, I will set it at rest at once. 

 That disease has no terrors for me now. I know so 

 well how to master it that it becomes in my hands as 

 docile as a well-trained horse. It no longer runs away 

 with me. You ask me how I manage it ? I will tell 

 you. Should the disease catch me in the forest, I take 

 the cure at once upon myself. I have abandoned my 

 old method of sending forty or fifty miles for a 

 doctor, for the reason that while I waited for the 

 " curer of bodies " to make his appearance the lumbago 

 was busy fixing its claws more firmly in my back. 

 My new method is this ; exercise, and plenty of it, 

 and the more violent the exercise, the more effective 

 it will be. I generally open the ball by trying how 

 far or how high I can jump. There is not much fun 

 in this, for at each jump your back feels as if it had 

 been split open. After the jumping I take a canoe 

 and paddle it for an hour or two. Then I pick out a 

 road, and this, to be of service, should run to the top 

 of some high ridge. The worse the road is, the better 

 it is — for the purpose. It should be full of windfalls, 

 soft wet places, and plenty of rocks — a road, in fact, 

 where even a well man would soon grow weary of 

 slipping and sliding and crawling over and under the 



