[CHAPTER VI.]
HOME GYMNASIUMS.
All that people need for their daily in-door exercises is a few pieces of apparatus which are fortunately so simple and inexpensive as to be within the reach of most persons. Buy two pitchfork handles at the agricultural store. Cut off enough of one of them to leave the main piece a quarter of an inch shorter than the distance between the jambs of your bedroom door, and square the ends. On each of these jambs fasten two stout hard-wood cleats, so slotted that the squared ends of the bar shall fit in snugly enough not to turn. Let the two lower cleats be directly opposite each other, and about as high as your shoulder; the other two also opposite each other, and as high above the head as you can comfortably reach.
Again, bore into the jamb, at about the height of your waist, a hole as large as the bar is thick. Now work the auger farther into each hole, till it reaches the first piece of studding, and then an inch or so into that. Find how many inches it is from the jamb to the end of the bore in the studding, and cut the second fork handle in halves. Pass one half through the hole in the jamb, and set its end into the hole in the studding. Bore a similar hole in the other jamb directly opposite, and repeat the last-named process with its nearest studding-piece, and adjust remainder of the fork handle to it. Now cut enough off each piece of the handle to leave the distance between the two about eighteen inches. You have then provided yourself with a pair of bars on which you can try one of the exercises usually practised on the parallel bars, and that one worth almost as much as all the rest. (See [Fig. 3.])
Fig. 3.
On the following page is a sketch of a pair of pulley-weights recently made, designed by Dr. Sargent, which are excellent. Their merits will be seen at a glance. Instead of the weights swaying sideways and banging against the boxes, as they are liable to do in the ordinary old-fashioned pulley-weight boxes, they travel in boxes, A A, between the rods B B. A rubber bed also prevents the weight from making a noise as it strikes the floor, while another capital feature is the arrangement of boxes, in which you may graduate the weight desired by adding little plates of a pound each, instead of the unchanging weight of the old plan.
Fig. 4.