summer, when the
sky is full of heavy inky clouds, and the earth smells fresh and sweet;
I love to go briskly homeward on a winter evening, when the sunset
smoulders low in the west, when the pheasants leap trumpeting to their
roosts, and the lights begin to peep in cottage windows.

Such joys as these are within the reach of every one; and to call the
country dull because one has not the opportunity of hitting and
pursuing a little white ball round and round among the same fields,
with elaborately contrived obstacles to test the skill and the temper,
seems to me to be grotesque, if it were not also so distressing.

I cannot help feeling that games are things that are appropriate to the
restless days of boyhood, when one will take infinite trouble and toil
over anything of the nature of a make-believe, so long as it is
understood not to be work; but as one gets older and perhaps wiser, a
simpler and quieter range of interests ought to take their place. I can
humbly answer for it that it need imply no loss of zest; my own power
of enjoyment is far deeper and stronger than it was in early years; the
pleasures I have described, of sight and sound, mean infinitely more to
me than the definite occupations of boyhood ever did. But the danger is
that if we are brought up ourselves to depend upon games, and if we
bring up all our boys to depend on them, we are not able to do without
them as we grow older; and thus we so often have the melancholy
spectacle of the elderly man, who is hopelessly bored with existence,
and who is the terror of the smoking-room and the dinner-table, because
he is only capable of indulging in lengthy reminiscences of his own
astonishing athletic performances, and in lamentations over the
degeneracy of the human race.

Another remarkable fact about the conventionality that attends games is
that certain games are dismissed as childish and contemptible while
others are crowned with glory and worship. One knows of eminent
clergymen who play golf; and that they should do so seems to constitute
so high a title to the respect and regard with which normal persons
view them, that one sometimes wonders whether they do not take up the
practice with the wisdom of the serpent that is recommended in the
Gospels, or because of the Pauline doctrine of adaptability, that by
all means they may save some.

But as far as mere air and exercise goes, the childish game of playing
at horses is admirably calculated to in