"Of course we must look at the proportion of profit. Hitherto the profits of beer and literature have not been comparable; but this wonderful boom in books of sport may redress the balance. Every one buys them. When you entered I was glancing through a volume of new verse, but without the smallest intention of buying it. My purchases, you see, are all sporting works, including, of course, Prince Ranjitsinhji's _Jubilee Book of Cricket_." "Just so," snapped Verinder. "You buy books about sport: we spend an afternoon in looking on at sport. And so, in one way or another, we assist at the damnation of the sporting spirit in England." When Verinder begins in this style an oration is never far distant. I walked back with the three to the Temple. On our way he hissed and sputtered like a kettle, and we had scarcely reached his chamber before he boiled over in real earnest. "We ought never to have been there! It's well enough for the Boy: he has been playing steadily all the summer, first for Cambridge and afterwards for his county. Now he has three days off and is taking his holiday. But Grayson and I--What the deuce have we to do in that galley? Far better we joined a club down at Dulwich or Tooting and put in a little honest play, of a week-end, on our own account. We should be crocks, of course: our cricketing is done. But we should be honest crocks. At least it is better to take a back row in the performance, and find out our own weakness, than pay for a good seat at Lord's or the Oval, and be Connoisseurs of what Abel and Hearne and Brockwell can and cannot do. If a man wants to sing the praises of cricket as a national game, let him go down to one of the Public Schools and watch its close or cricket-ground on a half-holiday: fifteen acres of turf, and a dozen games going on together, from Big Side down to the lowest form match: from three to four hundred boys in white flannels--all keen as mustard, and each occupied with his own game, and playing it to the best of his powers. _Playing it_--mark you: not looking on. That's the point: and that's what Wellington meant by saying--if he ever said it--that Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields at Eton. In my old school if a boy shirked the game he had a poor time. Say that he shirked it for an afternoon's lawn-tennis: it was lucky for him if he didn't find his racquet, next day, nailed up on the pavilion door like a stoat on a gamekeeper's tree. That was the sporting spirit, sir, if the sporting spirit means something that is to save England: and we shall not win another Waterloo by enclosing twenty-two gladiators in a ring of twenty-two thousand loafers, whose only exercise is to cheer when somebody makes a stroke, howl when some other body drops a catch, and argue that a batsman was not out when the umpire has given him 'leg-before.' Even at football matches the crowd has _some_ chance of taking physical exercise on its own account--by manhandling the