"The day called Christmas Day ye Gov^r cal'd them out to worke (as was used) but ye moste of this new company excused themselves, and saide y^t went against their consciences to work on y^t Day. So ye Gov^r tould them that if they made it mater of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away ye rest and left them; but when they came home at noon from their work he found them in ye street at play openly, some pitching ye bar, and some at stoolball and such like sports. So he went to them and took away their implements and tould them it was against his conscience that they should play and others work." The exact description of this game I do not know. Dr. Johnson says it is a play where balls are driven from stool to stool, which may be a good definition, but is a very poor explanation. The _Pretty Little Pocket Book_ says vaguely:-- "The ball once struck with Art and Care And drove impetuous through the Air, Swift round his Course the Gamester flies Or his Stools are taken by surprise." At the end of the seventeenth century a French traveller, named Misson, wrote a very vivacious account of his travels in England. He sagely noted English customs, fashions, attributes, and manners; and airily discoursed on the English game of football:-- "In winter football is a useful and charming exercise. It is a leather ball about as big as one's head, fill'd with wind. This is kick'd about from one to tother in the streets, by him that can get it, and that is all the art of it." That is all the art of it! I can imagine the sentiments of the general reader of that day (if any general reader existed in England at that time), when he read and noted the debonair simplicity of this brief account of what was even then a game of so much importance in England. The proof that Misson was truly ignorant of this subject is shown in the fact that he could by any stretch of an author's privileged imagination call the English game of foot-ball of that day "a useful and charming exercise." Nothing could be further from the Englishman's intent than to make it either profitable or pleasing. [Illustration: 3 Battledore and Shuttlecock. 4 Thread the Needle. Page from _Youthful Sports_] In the year 1583 a Puritan, named Phillip Stubbes, horror-stricken and sore afraid at the many crying evils and wickednesses which were rife in England, published a book which he called _The Anatomie of Abuses_. It was "made dialogue-wise," and is one of the most distinct contributions to our knowledge of Shakespeare's England. Written in racy, spirited English, it is unsparing in denunciations of the public and private evils of the day. His characterization of the game of foot-ball is one of the strongest and most fearless of his accusations:--