three clubs, which, if we remember right, constituted the Philadelphian cricket, world at that period, and they were all to be played on the old Germantown ground which had witnessed the performances of many of the greatest English players of former days, both amateur and professional. Some of us arrived early enough on the day preceding our first match to go out to the scene of action and have an hour or two of the practice so desperately needed. There was a business-like appearance about the spacious level sward, with its large pavilion and roomy stands, that did not tend to raise our spirits; and the glimpse we had of some of our opponents at the nets was from our point of view still less reassuring. It is needless to say we were most kindly received. The absence of our great bowler, if a catastrophe to us was a disappointment to the Americans who were thoroughly well up in the cricket of the day, all their principal matches even then being against Englishmen or English colonists. Moreover the side had been chosen with a view to facing this great hero; circumstances had mercifully prevented this from being representative, but it was bad enough in all conscience, and it was too late to suggest an alteration. Besides which we had some pride left (though not much), and had no choice now but to go through with the business to the bitter end. The fresh marks of a well-worn wicket in the centre of the ground told the tale of some heavy work within the last day or two, while on the table of the pavilion lay a score-book, which venturing to open, we there read a full explanation of the deep holes that had been so recently ploughed by the feet of agonized and defeated bowlers. A Canadian eleven, presumably more or less picked men, and certainly in full practice, had been here within the week to be routed with utter ignominy. The figures were appalling; we could quote them even yet, for the impression they made at the time was so great. Nor was this any hole-and-corner ground, where we could endure for a day the jeers of a dozen rustics and then sneak off in a break

through green lanes to the place whence we came. The city was crammed, and on our troubled pillow that night we saw in dreams the Germantown ground surrounded by mocking faces, for the international flavor of the coming game, though of a modest nature, could not be ignored and we felt that in a sense we had betrayed our country. To shorten, however, a tale already too long, we come out of the ordeal better by far than would have been thought possible from the ridiculous disparity of the two sides. To begin with, we picked up an Englishman from Canada who could both bowl and bat respectably; we also won the toss, and the audience happily was small. When half the side was out, and the lay-figures had begun their procession from the pavilion to the wicket and back, we had made, by painfully cautious cricket, nearly seventy runs, which was a far more creditable performance in the circumstances than any description of ours can convey. By the time the innings was completed another dozen had been added and a prolonged luncheon did not leave, on an alternoon in late September, so indefinite a period of leather-hunting. That the Philadelphians should have any respect for our bowling, or fail to take its measure at once and treat it accordingly, was not to be expected. We had a little luck, however, and they had not made very much over two hundred runs when stumps were drawn and by hook or by crook we had got most of them out. Thus ended, without the dire disgrace that seemed inevitable, our first and most important match. The others can be passed without remark, for we sent our five lay-figures on their way rejoicing to more congenial scenes, and replaced them with efficient substitutes, besides meeting weaker opponents.

Before taking leave of Philadelphia and its cricketers, an incident in connection with this same season may be worth recalling as, though slight enough in itself, it relates to no less a person than Charles Stewart Parnell. A match had been arranged by the Philadelphian Executive against eleven Englishmen,

drawn from all readily available sources in America, for which one or two of our team were asked to remain. The St. George's Club of New York furnished the chief British element, and at the last moment one of their men failed them. A leading spirit in New York cricket at that time was an Irish acquaintance of ours, who had frequently played with Parnell in country matches at home, and knew him comparatively well. The late Irish leader, it may be remembered, was a keen and passable cricketer in his younger days, and had been captain of the County Wicklow eleven. He was also locally somewhat notorious for being a bad loser in matches where his sympathies were deeply engaged; so at least we have heard from some who knew him on the cricket-field, and indeed his biographer, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, has not spared his hero in this particular. However this may be, our St. George's acquaintance, being for a moment at a loss for a substitute, remembered that Parnell was in New York, and hurried at once to his notel, with a view of carrying him off bodily to Philadelphia for the match. The future Irish chieftain was at that time only beginning to make his mark; but even if he had reached the pinnacle of his fame, the cheery giant who burst into his room while he was still in bed that morning, would have been the very last person in the world to let such trifles interfere with any fun that was in prospect, and above all with cricket. Parnell, thus suddenly aroused from his dreams, perchance of an Irish republic, readily yielded, having no other engagements, and promised to be at the station in due time. The next and most natural enquiry related to the composition of the sides, and when his unsuspecting visitor told him that the title of the match was Englishmen v. Americans, Parnell, metaphorically speaking, lay down in bed again at once and pulled the clothes over his head. Actually, however, he merely looked grave and remarked, "I don't think that would do at all." "And why to blazes not?" said his visitor, astonished and mortified. "Well," said Parnell, "I VOL. XV. 762

LIVING AGE.

don't know what they might say to it in Ireland; it is sure to be in the papers. No, I'm sorry, but I can't do it"-and he didn't. We give this story as we had it from the lips of the other Irishman himself, when a guest in his house. For ourselves we shall always confess to a sense of disappointment in having been thus deprived of the possibility of running between wickets with the Uncrowned King in a struggle for the honor of England.

1

While cricket still remains a limited and exclusive game in the United States, football has long ago gained the popular favor, and is almost as much of an institution as it has become in England. American football has indeed one advantage, in the fact that it is not around clubs of the Preston North End or Aston Villa type that popular interest chiefly centres, but rather on the amateur games played between universities and colleges. The number of these seats of learning in the United States is legion, and it need hardly be added that a great majority do not turn out representatives exactly on the pattern of Oxford or Cambridge. Still they are students and amateurs, and if their alma mater is not always venerable and celebrated like Harvard and Yale, there is as much esprit de corps no doubt among its athletes. At any rate that absurd product of modern sporting evolution, the professional football-player, does not fill the public eye to anything like the same extent as with us. The football-matches between the English universities, we take it, excite but little interest in comparison with that shown in the cricket-matches, and in our humble opinion rightly so; but the annual struggle between, let us say, Yale and Princeton on the Manhattan grounds at New York is a most prodigious function. At the last one we witnessed there were said to be between thirty and forty thousand spectators. How many of these were seated, and what prices were paid for good seats, we dare not venture to say, relying only on memory. The crowd, moreover, is mainly a well-dressed one and the event is regarded as a fashionable, as well as a

popular one. The New York papers for some days previously expand themselves in accounts and portraits of the players. There is quite a flutter throughout the city on the day of the match. Demonstrative undergraduates in every variety of vehicle throng the roads to the scene of action, together with the smart carriages of New York society. The mass of spectators, however, are borne thither on the elevated railroad, packed like herrings in a barrel, and suggesting the District Line to Putney on the day of the boat race. The scene inside the grounds is characteristic of the greater demonstrativeness of the Americans at play. The gates are besieged by the vendors of emblems wherewith to cheer on the players to victory, such as ribbons and small flags of the two university colors, and the effigies of defiant gamecocks mounted on sticks. The noise while the game is in progress is at times deafening. What would chiefly strike an Englishman, however, are those peculiar war cries which the older universities in America cherish, and which have been heard on a small scale, and not, it is to be feared, wholly with approval, at Henley. Suddenly, in the front of a crowded stand, an individual will be seen to leap to his feet brandishing a stick or umbrella; promptly upon this signal twenty or thirty of his immediate neighbors will spring up also and, in time to the waving of their impromptu conductor's wand, give vent to the sharp, jerky chorus of mysterious doggerel, that proclaims them members or past members of one or other university, Princeton men, if we remember right, proclaiming their identity and cheering on their friends with the Frogs' Chorus from Aristophanes. A demonstration like this will be taken, in some sort, as a challenge by rival groups of the other faction, and it is curious to see these small patches of organized vivacity breaking out all over the dense mass that throng the stands on every side of the ground. In the evening the city is, or used to be, given over to frolicsome undergraduates who, having shouted themselves hoarse in the afternoon, pro

ceeded to take one or two of the favorite theatres by storm; of late years, however, the terrorized managers have, we hear, made some sort of compromise, which secures them a partial immunity on these occasions. Many old Oxford and Cambridge men will remember Evans's supper-rooms on the night of the university boat-race; those historic performances were child's play to what certain theatrical managers in New York have, it is said, had occasionally to put up with.

The Americans are fortunate in having only one set of football rules. These are a compromise between Rugby and Association, and admit, beyond a doubt, of most elaborate combinations in play, besides being considerably rougher than either of the English codes. Each of the more celebrated colleges are distinguished by certain tactics, and from time to time the newspapers are agog with the rumor that Yale or Columbia (Harvard, though first in social and intellectual prestige seems never to be quite first in athletics) has developed some new and irresistible method of attack, which it is practising in strict privacy. Academic football, as we have said, leads the game in America. From the greater colleges of the East it has spread not only to all the smaller ones, but throughout the South and West, till there is scarcely an institution of any kind from the Atlantic to the Pacific without its regular programme of fixtures. We have tried sometimes to fancy the South Carolinian of twenty years ago playing football, and have signally failed. The thing is inconceivable! A hack, or an accidental knock, would in those days have led to Heaven knows what complications. We have played ourselves more than once against southern colleges in the primitive days of American football, and though it was not in such a fiery region as Carolina, there was even there a vague feeling of uncertainty pervading the atmosphere. In countries where the pistol and the knife are to every man's hand football is obviously full of dangerous possibilities. That it has now taken root in the South is a

sign more eloquent of an improving civilization than many columns of statistics.

With all this, however, American colleges, even the best of them, have not yet wholly caught the spirit in which English universities and public schools meet each other in friendly contests. We judge them solely out of the mouth of their own best critics and friends wno, in the columns of the more respectable journals, tell week after week and year after year the same tale. This is not after all a very bad tale, but it tells the American lads very plainly that they have not yet acquired that easy attitude towards each other, that quiet consciousness of fair play being a matter of course and not a matter of talk, which English amateurs enjoy in their mutual relations. Indeed, recent events have made it obvious that the American is still somewhat crude and savage in his athletic rivalry. He must win at all hazards, and in his morbid passion for victory is apt to lose sight of the main aim of outdoor sports. At one time the habit of introduc.ng professionals into college was common, but this has now been almost stamped out. The college clubs, moreover, seem somewhat slow in that mutual accommodation in the matter of fixtures which is essential to harmony. If, for example, the only date possible for an inter-college meeting seems to slightly favor one side, the other is apt to forego the contest altogether, thinking it better not to meet at all than to risk an honorable defeat. Harvard and Yale did not meet for years owing to some ridiculous hitch of this sort. But after all the American daily press, with the exception of a few of the best papers, is greatly prejudicial to true sport. To be continually confronted with newspapers that obviously uo not understand the very elements of such a thing, and when on this topic are nothing if not sensational and vulgar, must affect even the best of the rising generation.

kind to dwell too much on certain defects that are the result of immaturity in part, and in part to that very enthusiasm with which the people of the United States throw themselves into anything they undertake.

Since writing the last words of this paper, accounts of a case lately tried in the American courts have come to hand, which illustrate, in somewhat humorous fashion, a novel and indeed formidable view of the responsibilities of the football field. If this particular jury had shown sympathy in this case for the plaintiff, another terror would indeed have been added to the life of the American paterfamilias. It seems that a boy, having been injured, though not seriously, in a school match, his fond parent proceeded to make the matter a question of law. If he had sued the school authorities it might have been a foolish act, but it would have been wholly an uninteresting one to the public, and an incident quite unworthy of record. But this delightful person went to the root of the matter and brought an action against the father of the boy who delivered the ill-fated kick. If the jury had gone wrong, conceive the possibilities that would have attached to the possession of a son who was a vigorous forward in the footballfield. Fortunately, these twelve good and just men kept their heads, were deaf to the blandishments of counsel, and the fathers of American footballplayers again breathed freely.