[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT RUGBY SCHOOL] CHAPTER VI ENGLAND AT PLAY "These English take their pleasures sadly," said a French wit. It was a misunderstanding of the national expression. The Englishman takes his pleasures not sadly but resolutely. It is a holiday. He is out to enjoy himself. He _will_ enjoy himself whatever the obstacles. There is a grim resolve in his mind. But he is not sad: he is resolutely merry. That look on his face is not agony; it is stern determination. I have seen Hampstead Heath on the midsummer Bank Holiday. A frowning sky, a bleak wind, and occasional gusty showers of rain declared the day to be not of midsummer and not suitable to open-air holiday. But the East End was not to be deterred from merriment. "London's playground" was like a huge ant-hill with swarming holiday-makers, and all had made up their dogged English minds to rejoice and be merry. That was apparent from the first. In the "Tube" railways girls of from sixteen to sixty--all girly--giggled hilariously at everything and anything and nothing. "It's from the other side" announced one on the train platform; and this fact about the train's going was greeted with shouting laughter, and the "joke" went round a widening circle of rippling merriment. On the road, the coster's cart, loaded with Mr. and Mrs. Coster and a group of Costerlings--the numerousness of which said "no race suicide here"--scattered abroad song, vociferous if not tuneful. When a shower came the song grew louder, as though to smother the weather. Commerce helped the people's resolve to be gay. You could buy a bag of confetti for a halfpenny; for the same sum a stick adorned with bright paper streamers, or a tuft of gorgeously-dyed flax. A penny provided a tartan cap in paper, wearing which one might be quite ridiculously gay. The oceans had been dredged and the earth rifled for the people's holiday. Shellfish of all sorts, bananas from the West Indies, plums from Spain, roses from Kent and Surrey, pine-apple tinned at Singapore, bright nacre shells from Australian beaches, little love-birds from Papua trained as "fortune-tellers" to pick out a paper telling you of the happiness in store for you--all these were at your service; and the standard price was one penny. A few coppers opened up for the holiday Englishman the resources of a whole Empire.