sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a
swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where
the ball is, and there are the keen players to be met, and the glory and
the hard knocks to be got. You hear the dull thud, thud of the ball, and
the shouts of "Off your side," "Down with him," "Put him over," "Bravo."
This is what we call "a scrummage," gentlemen, and the first scrummage
in a School-house match was no joke in the consulship of Plancus.

But see! it has broken; the ball is driven out on the School-house side,
and a rush of the School carries it past the School-house players-up.
"Look out in quarters," Brooke's and twenty other voices ring out. No
need to call, though: the School-house captain of quarters has caught it
on the bound, dodges the foremost School boys, who are heading the rush,
and sends it back with a good drop-kick well into the enemy's country.
And then follows rush upon rush, and scrummage upon scrummage, the ball
now driven through into the School-house quarters, and now into the
School goal; for the School-house have not lost the advantage which the
kick-off and a slight wind gave them at the outset, and are slightly
"penning" their adversaries. You say you don't see much in it
all--nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball which
seems to excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a bull. My
dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except that the
boys would be men, and the balls iron; but a battle would be worth
your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. You can't be
expected to appreciate the delicate strokes of play, the turns by which
a game is lost and won--it takes an old player to do that; but the broad
philosophy of football you can understand if you will. Come along with
me a little nearer, and let us consider it together.

The ball has just fallen again where the two sides are thickest, and
they close rapidly around it in a scrummage. It must be driven through
now by force or skill, till it flies out on one side or the other.
Look how differently the boys face it! Here come two of the bulldogs,
bursting through the outsiders; in they go, straight to the heart of the
scrummage, bent on driving that ball out on the opposite side. That is
what they mean to do. My sons, my sons! you are too hot; you have gone
past the ball, and must struggle now right through the scrummage, and
get round and back again to you