"The odd by a head, and leg before," so the Judge he gave the word: And the Umpire shouted "Over!" but I neither spoke nor stirred. They crowded round: for there on the ground I lay in a dead-cold swoon, Pitched neck and crop on the turf atop of my beautiful Wooden Spoon. Her dewlap tire was punctured, her bearings all red-hot; She'd a lolling tongue, and her bowsprit sprung, and her running gear in a knot; And amid the sobs of her backers, Sir Robert loosened her girth And led her away to the knacker's. She had raced her last on earth! But I mind me well of the tear that fell from the eye of our noble Prince, And the things he said as he tucked me in bed--and I've lain there ever since; Tho' it all gets mixed up queerly that happened before my spill, --But I draw my thousand yearly: it'll pay for the doctor's bill. I'm going out with the tide, lad.--You'll dig me a humble grave, And whiles you will bring your bride, lad, and your sons (if sons you have), And there, when the dews are weeping, and the echoes murmur "Peace!" And the salt, salt tide comes creeping and covers the popping-crease, In the hour when the ducks deposit their eggs with a boasted force, They'll look and whisper "How was it?" and you'll take them over the course, And your voice will break as you try to speak of the glorious first of June, When the Jubilee Cup, with John Jones up, was won upon Wooden Spoon. "To me," said a well-known authority upon education, "these athletics are the devil." To me no form of athletics is the devil but that of paying other people to be athletic for you; and this, unhappily--and partly, I believe, through our neglect to provide our elementary schools with decent playgrounds--is the form affected nowadays by large and increasing crowds of Englishmen. The youth of our urban populations would seem to be absorbed in this vicarious sport. It throngs the reading-rooms of free public libraries and working men's institutes in numbers which delight the reformer until he discovers that all this avidity is for racing tips and cricket or football "items." I am not, as a rule, a croaker; but I do not think the young Briton concerns himself as he did in the fifties, sixties, and seventies of the last century with poetry, history, politics, or indeed anything that asks for serious thought. I believe all this professional sport likely to be as demoralising for us as a nation as were the gladiatorial shows for Rome; and I cannot help attributing to it some measure of that combativeness at second-hand--that itch to fight anyone and everyone by proxy--which, abetted by a cheap press, has for twenty years been our curse.