follow the profound thoughts of those who
always dived deeper, even in the river, than our efforts could attain.
There is a certain governor, of whom we personally can remember only,
that he found the Fresh Pond heronry, which we sought in vain; and
in memory the august sheriff of a neighboring county still skates in
victorious pursuit of us, (fit emblem of swift-footed justice!) on the
black ice of the same lovely lake. Our imagination crowns the Cambridge
poet, and the Cambridge sculptor, not with their later laurels, but with
the willows out of which they taught us to carve whistles, shriller than
any trump of fame, in the happy days when Mount Auburn was Sweet Auburn
still.

Luckily, boy-nature is too strong for theory. And we admit, for the sake
of truth, that physical education is not so entirely neglected among us
as the absence of popular games would indicate. We suppose, that, if the
truth were told, this last fact proceeds partly from the greater freedom
of field-sports in this country. There are few New England boys who do
not become familiar with the rod or gun in childhood. We take it, that,
in the mother country, the monopoly of land interferes with this, and
that game laws, by a sort of spontaneous pun, tend to introduce games.

Again, the practice of match-playing is opposed to our habits, both as
a consumer of time and as partaking too much of gambling. Still, it is
done in the case of "firemen's musters," which are, we believe, a wholly
indigenous institution. We have known a very few cases where the young
men of neighboring country parishes have challenged each other to games
of base-ball, as is common in England; and there was, if we mistake not,
a recent match at football between the boys of the Fall River and
the New Bedford High Schools. And within a few years regattas and
cricket-matches have become common events. Still, these public
exhibitions are far from being a full exponent of the athletic habits of
our people; and there is really more going on among us than this meagre
"pentathlon" exhibits.

Again, a foreigner is apt to infer, from the more desultory and
unsystematized character of our out-door amusements, that we are less
addicted to them than we really are. But this belongs to the habit of
our nation, impatient, to a fault, of precedents and conventionalisms.
The English-born Frank Forrester complains of the total indifference
of our sportsmen to correct phraseology. We should say, h