my obligation to this interesting book for much
help in writing the present chapter.

[14] A match played in no less aristocratic a place than Newport on
Sept. 2, 1897, between the local team and a club from Brockton, ended
in a general scrimmage, in which even women joined in the cry of "Kill
the umpire!"

[15] It is, perhaps, only fair to quote on the other side the opinion
of Mr. Rudolf Lehmann, the well-known English rowing coach, who
witnessed the match between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania
in 1897. He writes in the London _News_: "I have never seen a finer
game played with a manlier spirit. The quickness and the precision of
the players were marvellous.... The game as I saw it, though it was
violent and rough, was never brutal. Indeed, I cannot hope to see a
finer exhibition of courage, strength, and manly endurance, without a
trace of meanness."

And to Mr. Lehmann's voice may be added that of a "Mother of Nine
Sons," who wrote to the Boston _Evening Transcript_ in 1897, speaking
warmly of the advantages of football in the formation of habits of
self-control and submission to authority.

VIII

The Humour of the "Man on the Cars"

"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the
apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of
John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide
difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the
American. John Bull's downrightness appears in his jests also. His
jokes must be unmistakable; he wants none of your quips masquerading
as serious observations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a
sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. "Those
animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to say in showing his panorama.
"I know they are--because my artist says so. I had the picture two
years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six
months ago and said, 'It is useless to disguise it from you any
longer--they are horses.'"[16] This is the form of introduction that
John Bull prefers for his witticisms. He will welcome a joke as
hospitably as a visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the
other are unimpeachable.

Now the American does not wish his joke underlined like an urgent
parliamentary whip. He wants something left to his imagination; he
wants to be tickled by the feeling th