ts mixed up queerly that happened before my spill,
--But I draw my thousand yearly: it'll pay for the doctor's bill.

I'm going out with the tide, lad.--You'll dig me a humble grave,
And whiles you will bring your bride, lad, and your sons
(if sons you have),
And there, when the dews are weeping, and the echoes murmur "Peace!"
And the salt, salt tide comes creeping and covers the popping-crease,

In the hour when the ducks deposit their eggs with a boasted force,
They'll look and whisper "How was it?" and you'll take them over the
course,
And your voice will break as you try to speak of the glorious first
of June,
When the Jubilee Cup, with John Jones up, was won upon Wooden Spoon.

"To me," said a well-known authority upon education, "these athletics are
the devil." To me no form of athletics is the devil but that of paying
other people to be athletic for you; and this, unhappily--and partly, I
believe, through our neglect to provide our elementary schools with decent
playgrounds--is the form affected nowadays by large and increasing crowds
of Englishmen. The youth of our urban populations would seem to be
absorbed in this vicarious sport. It throngs the reading-rooms of free
public libraries and working men's institutes in numbers which delight the
reformer until he discovers that all this avidity is for racing tips and
cricket or football "items." I am not, as a rule, a croaker; but I do not
think the young Briton concerns himself as he did in the fifties, sixties,
and seventies of the last century with poetry, history, politics, or
indeed anything that asks for serious thought. I believe all this
professional sport likely to be as demoralising for us as a nation as were
the gladiatorial shows for Rome; and I cannot help attributing to it some
measure of that combativeness at second-hand--that itch to fight anyone
and everyone by proxy--which, abetted by a cheap press, has for twenty
years been our curse.

Curse or no curse, it is spreading; and something of its progress may be
marked in the two following dialogues, the first of which was written in
1897. Many of the names in it have already passed some way toward
oblivion; but the moral, if I mistake not, survives them, and the warning
has become more urgent than ever.

THE FIRST DIALOGUE ON CRICKET.

1897.

Some time in the su