In a sportsman it would be most ungracious to inveigh against English weather. The very qualities one instinctively curses make possible the full and varied development of outdoor games, which Americans admire without stint. Our football teams do day labor to get fit, and then, after a game or so, the sport is nipped in the bud. To teach our oarsmen the rudiments of the stroke we resort to months of the galley-slavery of tank-rowing. Our track athletes begin their season in the dead of winter with the dreary monotony of wooden dumb-bells and pulley-weights, while the baseball men are learning to slide for bases in the cage. In England the gymnasium is happily unknown. Winter and summer alike the sportsman lives beneath the skies, and the sports are so diverse and so widely cultivated that any man, whatever his mental or physical capacity, finds suitable exercise that is also recreation. It is because of this universality of athletic sports that English training is briefer and less severe. The American makes, and is forced to make, a long and tedious business of getting fit, whereas an Englishman has merely to exercise and sleep a trifle more than usual, and this only for a brief period. Our oarsmen work daily from January to July, about six months, or did so before Mr. Lehmann brought English ideas among us; the English 'varsity crews row together nine or ten weeks. Our football players slog daily for six or seven weeks; English teams seldom or never "practice," and play at most two matches a week. Our track athletes are in training at frequent intervals throughout the college year, and are often at the training-table six weeks; in England six weeks is the maximum period of training, and the men as a rule are given only three days a week of exercise on the cinder-track. To an American training is an abnormal condition; to an Englishman it is the consummation of the normal. The moderation of English training is powerfully abetted by a peculiarity of the climate. The very dullness and depression that make exercise imperative also make it impossible to sustain much of it. The clear, bright American sky--the sky that renders it difficult for us to take the same delight in Italy as an Englishman takes, and leads us to prefer Ruskin's descriptions to the reality--cheers the American athlete; and the crispness of the atmosphere and its extreme variability keeps his nerves alert. An English athlete would go hopelessly stale on work that would scarcely key an American up to his highest pitch.