go into the game for the pleasure it affords
nearly so heartily as his representative of yore, but it may be that the
Compulsory Clause in the Education Act has made him more refined, or, if
you like it, a good deal more cunning in hiding his animal spirits and
exuberance of innocent fun. Be that as it may, the Association Football
of to-day does not really possess the same charm to me as it did ten
years ago.

I was once a very fair player, but never considered sufficiently
brilliant to get my name handed down to posterity as the crack half-back
of the "Invincible Club" of bygone days, or proclaimed aloud in the
secret recesses of the great "houf" where football players now retire to
spend a social hour after finding themselves the victors of a
hard-fought field. I must admit, however, that I did some clever things
which the newspapers of that era ought to have at least given me a
"puff" for, but they didn't; in fact, I never, like Byron (Lord Byron, I
mean), awoke one morning to find myself famous, because my football was
that of days long ago, in an obscure (to football, at least) country
town; and, besides, the game then was conducted in rather a rude and
undignified fashion. Talk about rules, we had those which might, for all
I know, have been framed by the "Chief Souter of Selkirk" himself to
suit the peculiar mode of playing on the streets at Shrovetide (a
practice still in vogue near that Border land). Our captain knew nothing
of such new-fangled devices as the Rugby code, and far less of the
Football Association. Ours, in brief, was a sort of combination of both
styles of play. To win a "hail," as it was termed, the opposing side,
with shoving, hacking, and other descriptions of horse-play, had only to
pass the ball over the line, and it was won. Touch-lines, corner-flags,
twenty-five flags, and even upright posts, and the usual concomitants of
the scientific game of to-day, were unknown. This leads me, then, to the
point of tracing the rise and progress of the game in Scotland during
the past dozen years, leaving its antiquity and origin, about which
there are mere surmises, an "open question." That it was played,
however, in Edinburgh and Glasgow at least twenty years ago, under rules
somewhat similar to those now adhered to by the followers of the Rugby
Union I can well remember, and this was the only kind of football known
by the young athletes of that time. Over a dozen years ago many were the
exciting con