a side are made the game is counted to have been a failure. These games at the Academy are not played continuously, but begin before school in the morning, then at morning recess, then during the dinner hour, and are finished in the afternoon recess. After school, with whoops and cries of divers sorts the youngsters disperse to their homes, some of which are miles away. Several years ago they all walked home, but now the majority of them go to and fro on bicycles. In watching my neighbors of the school and their goings and comings I have discovered where the discarded bicycles that have gone out of fashion in town disappear to. They are taken to the country, and there the lads in the cowhide boots in winter and bare feet in summer pedal them up hill and down, alike ignorant of and indifferent to the fact that their much-cherished wheels are out of style. The games the real country boys play are few, and would not be exciting to the lads who exercise on the Berkeley Oval; but they are entirely wholesome and harmless, and serve just as good a purpose as they would if they were in what more sophisticated people call good form. Fun is, to a great extent, a matter of education, and the same standard will not serve to measure the amusements of all classes alike. This is a most fortunate fact; and when I consider it I doubt whether in my own youth I may not, after all, have had in my limited range as much genuine sport as the lads I see in my neighbors' lawns, throwing off their gayly striped blazers preparatory to trying their skill in the tennis-court that has just been marked out. THE DAISIES. BY JOHN VANCE CHENEY. Daisies, once, in noonday dream, Heard I gossip by a stream, Secrecies too sweet to name; 'Mong them, daisies, how you came By your shining skyey faces, Where you learned these magic paces. On a night, far, far away, Certain stars that loved to play In the pond across the way, At a signal--so they say-- Put their beams out; what is more, One by one they slipped ashore. When their mates look from the sky. Now we know why every eye, Up and down this fairy ground, Plays go-sleepin' oh, so sound! Eyes and hearts of summer day, Daisies, you have run away. THE SLAMBANGAREE. (_In Two Parts._) BY R. K. MUNKITTRICK. Part I. The other night Reginald was tossing about in his little bed, unable to go to sleep. The dull monotonous ticking of the clock fell upon his ear in a way that drove him almost mad, and the rain pattering upon the window-pane added to his misery, and made him wish for the light of morning as he had never wished for it before. And when the trees moaned in the wind, it filled poor Reginald's mind with dire forebodings, and caused him to bury his curly head deeper in the pillow to deaden the weird refrain that rippled in the blinds with a sort of fiendish playfulness.