point of
ruling.

One of the best things to have when out of doors is a ball. There is
no end to the uses one can make of it.

Ball Games

The simplest thing to do with a ball is to catch it; and the quicker
one is in learning to catch well the better baseball player one will
become. Ordinary catching in a ring is good, but the practice is
better if you try to throw the ball each time so that the player to
whom you throw it shall not need to move his feet in order to catch
it. This teaches straight throwing too. Long and high throwing and
catching, and hard throwing and catching (standing as close together
as you dare), are important. There is also dodge-catching, where you
pretend to throw to one player and really throw to another and thus
take him unawares. All these games can be varied and made more
difficult by using only one hand, right or left, for catching.

Ball Games Alone

A boy with a ball need never be very lonely. When tired of catching it
in the ordinary way he can practice throwing the ball straight into
the air until, without his moving from his place, it falls absolutely
on him each time. He can throw it up and catch it behind him, and if
he has two others (or stones will do) he can strive for the juggler's
accomplishment of keeping three things in the air at once. Every boy
should practice throwing with his left hand (or, if he is already
left-handed, with his right): a very useful accomplishment. If it is a
solid india-rubber ball and there is a blank wall, he can make it
rebound at different angles, one good way being, in throwing it, to
let it first hit the ground close to the wall's foot. He may also
pledge himself to catch it first with the right hand and then with the
left for a hundred times; or to bat it up a hundred times with a
tennis racket or a flat bit of board. An interesting game for one is
to mark out a golf course round the garden, making a little hole at
intervals of half a dozen yards or so, and see how many strokes are
needed in going round and getting into each hole on the way.

Races

All kinds of races are easy to arrange and these can be repeated from
day to day as your proficiency increases. Here are a few.

The Spanish race, sometimes called the Wheelbarrow race, is played by
forming the boys into two lines, one standing back of the other, and
the front row on their hands and knees. At a signal to begin, each boy
on the back row takes hold of the ankles of the