But, as I was saying, marbles are not played as they used to be. The police are getting more interfering every day; they tell the boys to move on and not block up the pavement, and that interrupts them in the middle of a game and makes them half wild; and if you don’t clear off at once, they kick your marbles into the gutter where they get lost down a drain, and that makes you altogether mad. Aunt Eliza explains things by saying that marble-games wear out boys’ clothes at the knees and that mothers are growing to be “more careful in such matters.” More fussy, I call it. And then she says--and I say what she says simply can’t be believed, though it would prove what _I_ said--she says--and I say she says these things not because she knows them but just because she believes them, or believes she believes them, or believes she ought to believe them, like some people do; or perhaps not even that; because how is she to _know_ them: that’s what I want to know?--she says that marbles--and I say it’s the worst of Aunt Eliza that when she says a thing you never know exactly where you are; and, upon my word, I don’t believe she knows either; nor does anybody else, for that matter; and, what’s more, nobody really cares; and it wouldn’t much matter if they did, which is just as well--she says that marbles--and I say it all comes from wasting her time running all over the place in a feather hat and silk garters, ever since she came in for that little bit and left off trying to be schoolmistress, and messing about the way she has done with children’s homes and a lot of old cranks, instead of doing some honest work at home--she says that marbles, and not only marbles but HOOPS, used to be played by the big boys at the public schools. Hoops: that’s what she says. And I say: hoops be blowed. With all respect to Aunt Eliza, I might have swallowed marbles, but I can’t swallow hoops; not on this side of the year after next. I know this, at least, that if a big lad were seen playing, or ever had been seen playing, with a hoop, down our way, except, perhaps, an iron one--why, his own parents wouldn’t know him again, when he got home, if he ever did, which I rather doubt; and that’s all there is to it. His father would ask whether some poor loony had been trying to box with a traction-engine going at full steam, and his mother would want to know what on earth made somebody put a lot of something through the sausage-machine without sifting out all those buttons first. But that’s neither here nor there, except in so far as it shows what Aunt Eliza’s explanations are worth. Mr. Perkins, of Framlingham Brothers (a good old firm--and a nice place he’s got, too)--he’s an understandable kind of gentleman and he gets talking about things after his second pint of Burton and he says, speaking of marbles, that he’s noticed the same thing as I have. And when I asked him _why_ marbles are going out of fashion, he says: