To the
thoughtless, it may be simply comic; but, without being a Jaques, one
may contrive also to suck some melancholy out of it.
Now, as I have never caught a cricket-ball, and, on the contrary, have
caught numerous crabs in my life, the sympathy which I feel for these
declining athletes is not due to any great personal interest in the
matter. But I have long anticipated that a similar day would come for
me, when I should no longer be able to pursue my favourite sport of
mountaineering. Some day I should find that the ascent of a zigzag was
as bad as a performance on the treadmill; that I could not look over a
precipice without a swimming in the head; and that I could no more jump
a crevasse than the Thames at Westminster. None of these things have
come to pass. So far as I know, my physical powers are still equal to
the ascent of Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. But I am no less effectually
debarred--it matters not how--from mountaineering. I wander at the foot
of the gigantic Alps, and look up longingly to the summits, which are
apparently so near, and yet know that they are divided from me by an
impassable gulf.
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