"Perhaps. But even in the Old World, where you'd think they'd had time enough, they've got at only one aspect of the evil. They're alive to the need of mere exercise, especially in England. Oh, the devices!" laughed the young man, "by which the idle well-to-do may, in default, as you would say, of trees to fell or coal to dig and bricks to lay, develop, notwithstanding, their biceps and their chests! I've seen many a fellow, with a quite ludicrous absence of enjoyment, doing dumb-bell whim-whams, or shouldering his golf-clubs, or going off to play rackets, with the stern resolve to get his quantum of exercise, whether it amuses him or not." "Yes, yes, yes," John Gano broke in, "mere cultivators of muscle don't interest me much, though they go a step in the right direction. A man must face and overcome hardship, _real_ hardship, before he's good for anything. Man is like the good wheat, he flourishes where it's cold enough to give him a good pinching frost once a year. Your finest-flavored fruits are grown where man contends with Nature, not as in the tropics, where she drops her insipid increase into his idle lap. Those games that men play at while their brothers starve are well enough for those who like 'em, but the great majority of average boys and girls, and even, to some extent, perverted men and women, too, are never so well amused as when they're _making something_. If every one had some bit of manual labor to do, something he could do with love, studying to bring it to perfection--" "Ah yes," said Ethan, with a livelier interest, "that might bring men back a sense of beauty." "At all events," said the elder, sturdily, "it would bring man back to the bed-rock of wholesome endeavor; and while he was strengthening his muscles and his morals, and laying up a fit inheritance for his children, he would be helping to solve the industrial problem of the world. The vulgar stigma would be lifted from the laboring class." "Ah--h'm--yes," murmured Ethan, with a somewhat lackadaisical air. John Gano studied his nephew's long, careless, lounging figure with a growing disapproval. "In the time to come," said John Gano, significantly, "the only idle will be the few, and ever fewer, sick, and the very old. Chronic disease will be looked upon as the only lasting disgrace. The evil will hide their complaints as carefully as to-day they hide their crimes. They will be more ashamed of an attack of indigestion or of gout than a man is to-day of being seen drunk in public, or caught robbing a till. He who passes a disease down the line will be looked upon as a traitor, the only criminal deserving capital punishment." Ethan looked up quickly, scrutinizing the grim face for a moment, and then, unaccountably to himself, his own look went down.