reputation, but you are not chosen to play in the International. Your father may be the "Great Mogul" himself, but that has no effect. The coveted place can only be attained by merit, and this is one of the most successful and meritorious traits in Scotch Association Football. You don't, as a rule, even get a place now by reputation, and so much the better. When clubs were few and good players fewer, you were not unfrequently favoured with one, whether you deserved it or not, but now the matter is different, and justly so, since we cannot go into a single town or village in Scotland without seeing the practice ground and goal-posts of the now omnipresent football club. _IX.--A DREAM OF THE PAST._ I am getting old and stiff now, at least in a football sense, but have seen and played in, perhaps, more big matches in my time than many will be inclined to give me credit for now. Somehow or other the modern player does not seem to go into the game for the pleasure it affords nearly so heartily as his representative of yore, but it may be that the Compulsory Clause in the Education Act has made him more refined, or, if you like it, a good deal more cunning in hiding his animal spirits and exuberance of innocent fun. Be that as it may, the Association Football of to-day does not really possess the same charm to me as it did ten years ago. I was once a very fair player, but never considered sufficiently brilliant to get my name handed down to posterity as the crack half-back of the "Invincible Club" of bygone days, or proclaimed aloud in the secret recesses of the great "houf" where football players now retire to spend a social hour after finding themselves the victors of a hard-fought field. I must admit, however, that I did some clever things which the newspapers of that era ought to have at least given me a "puff" for, but they didn't; in fact, I never, like Byron (Lord Byron, I mean), awoke one morning to find myself famous, because my football was that of days long ago, in an obscure (to football, at least) country town; and, besides, the game then was conducted in rather a rude and undignified fashion. Talk about rules, we had those which might, for all I know, have been framed by the "Chief Souter of Selkirk" himself to suit the peculiar mode of playing on the streets at Shrovetide (a practice still in vogue near that Border land). Our captain knew nothing of such new-fangled devices as the Rugby code, and far less of the Football Association. Ours, in brief, was a sort of combination of both styles of play. To win a "hail," as it was termed, the opposing side, with shoving, hacking, and other descriptions of horse-play, had only to pass the ball over the line, and it was won. Touch-lines, corner-flags, twenty-five flags, and even upright posts, and the usual concomitants of the scientific game of to-day, were unknown. This leads me, then, to the point of tracing the rise and progress of the game in Scotland during