HOW TO GET STRONG
ioner. There he would dismiss it and set forth on his round of calls, zigzagging afoot across the countryside. It would be evening before he had walked into town again, with more miles to his credit than most men would care to negotiate between daylight and dark, and generally having conducted a service and preached at the house of one of his parishioners. In his trips abroad he still likes to walk about the scenes of his youth, as well as to stroll through the stores and book-stalls of the English cities."
One of the grandest-looking men to-day in New York; indeed in America; about six feet two inches high; weighing nearly three hundred pounds, and carrying it with great ease; erect and noble of bearing. The account continues: "Still a twelvemonth and over this side of three-score-and-ten, John Hall's appearance of manly vigor is such as to make the stranger stand and gaze when he passes on the street. His stature, almost that of a giant, bespeaks a reserve of physical strength on which, as the unaided pastor in a charge that would make exacting demands of any one, he has made frequent drafts. A ruddy and kindly face framed in white hair surmounts his broad shoulders."
One does not need to study that great head and body long to see that he has indeed "a reserve of physical strength "; and what a factor it must have been in his extraordinary success in this great field?
And fortunately we have the great divine's own word as to the aid his splendid body has been to him, for on May 18, 1898, he wrote thus: "There is good reason for my gratitude to God for health of body, so that for forty-nine years I have been permitted to labor as a minister, without any interruption such as I have just passed through. Abstinence from tobacco and stimu-
426
