it is dull. And do not,
please, suggest that I am talking of it as an old man's game only. I have
played it since I was a boy, forty years ago, and I cannot say at what age
I have loved it best. It is a game for all ages, all seasons, all sexes,
all climates, for summer evenings or winter nights, for land or for sea. It
is the very water of Lethe for sorrow or disappointment, for there is no
oblivion so profound as that which it offers for your solace. And what
satisfaction is there comparable with a well-won "mate"? It is different
from any other joy that games have to offer. There is a swift delight in a
late "cut" or a ball that spread-eagles the other fellow's wicket; there is
a delicate pleasure in a long jenny neatly negotiated, in a drive that
sails straight from the tee towards the flag on the green, in a hard return
that hits the back line of the tennis court. But a perfect "mate"
irradiates the mind with the calm of indisputable things. It has the
absoluteness of mathematics, and it gives you victory ennobled by the sense
of intellectual struggle and stern justice. There are "mates" that linger
in the memory like a sonnet of Keats.

It is medicine for the sick mind or the anxious spirit. We need a means of
escape from the infinite, from the maze of this incalculable life, from the
burden and the mystery of a world where all things "go contrairy," as Mrs.
Gummidge used to say. Some people find the escape in novels that move
faithfully to that happy ending which the tangled skein of life denies us.
Some find it in hobbies where the mind is at peace in watching processes
that are controllable and results that with patience are assured. But in
the midst of this infinity I know no finite world so complete and
satisfying as that I enter when I take down the chessmen and marshal my
knights and squires on the chequered field. It is then I am truly happy. I
have closed the door on the infinite and inexplicable and have come into a
kingdom where justice reigns, where cause and effect follow "as the night
the day," and where, come victory or come defeat, the sky is always clear
and the joy unsullied.

ON THE DOWNS

We spread our lunch on the crown of one of those great billows of the downs
that stand along the sea. Down in the hollows tiny villages or farmsteads
stood in the midst of clumps of trees, and the cultivated lands looked like
squares of many-coloured carpets, brown carpets and yellow carpets and
gre