=182. Out-Door Games. Ball Games, _Trigon_.=--Among out-of-door amusements, we find that young Romans and some of their elders enjoy fairly elaborate games of ball. There are various exercises which show that the world is on its way to handball, tennis, and even to polo, but hardly any contests foreshadow such things as baseball, foot ball, or cricket. The most common game is _trigon_, when three players stand at the corners of a triangle, and at least three, or even six balls, are kept flying around the circle with great rapidity; the points being made on catching and throwing with as few misses as possible. The players stand close together, and the whole sport is more a mild form of juggling than it is any real field exercise. CHAPTER XI BOOKS AND LIBRARIES =183. Letters and Writing Tablets.=--The multiplication of schools presupposes the constant use of books, correspondence, and other forms of writing. What are these like? [Illustration: WAX TABLET WITH STILUS ATTACHED.] “Tablets” are seen everywhere. Upper-class people delight in scribbling down memoranda. The story even runs that Augustus wrote out his intended conversations with his wife Livia “lest he should say too much or too little,” a testimony at once to the need of circumspect dealings with the lady and to a great mania for writing. Ordinary tablets are made of two or three thin strips of wood joined together like later-day book-covers, and spread over the inside with a thin coating of wax. On this wax, often black and dingy, day accounts and business messages can be scratched with facility. But really important fashionable letters demand something better. The leaves can be made of fine citrus wood or even of ivory. As for very special correspondence, love letters, and the like, these are written on very small tablets in contrast to the broad slabs carrying the merchant accounts. If you want a handsome note book, you can buy one with a number of folding leaves and with outside covers of finely chased ivory, silver, or gold, and such handsome note books make very convenient presents among friends. By a convention attached to the high office, when Calvus became prætor, he presented his intimates with tablets adorned with his own portrait in low relief on ivory, and with scenes of the prætor’s tribunal. If he had been consul, he would have been expected to give around bunches of tablets even more elegant. [Illustration: WRITING TABLETS AND STILUS.]