me feel a touch of sadness; their approaching
elevation to the dignity of manhood will raise them on the whole in the
scale of humanity; it is the older spectators whose aspect has in it
something affecting. The shaky old gentleman, who played in the days
when it was decidedly less dangerous to stand up to bowling than to a
cannon-ball, and who now hobbles about on rheumatic joints, by the help
of a stick; the corpulent elder, who rowed when boats had gangways down
their middle, and did not require as delicate a balance as an acrobat's
at the top of a living pyramid--these are the persons whom I cannot see
without an occasional sigh. They are really conscious that they have
lost something which they can never regain; or, if they momentarily
forget it, it is even more forcibly impressed upon the spectators. To
see a respectable old gentleman of sixty, weighing some fifteen stone,
suddenly forget a third of his weight and two-thirds of his years, and
attempt to caper like a boy, is indeed a startling phenomenon. 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. In some missionary work I have read that certain South
Sea Islanders believed in a future paradise where the good should go on
eating for ever with insatiable appetites at an inexhaustible banquet.
They were to continue their eternal dinner in a house with open
wickerwork sides; and it was to be the punishm