To the out-door sports of this merry time which arise out of the natural phenomena of the season itself, we need do no more than allude here, because every school-boy knows far more about them than we are now able to tell him, though we too reckoned them all amidst the delights of our boyhood. The rapid motions and graceful manœuvres of the skilful amongst the skaters, the active games connected with this exercise (such as the Golf of our northern neighbors, not very commonly practised in England), the merry accidents of the sliders, and the loud and mischievous laugh of the joyous groups of snowballers,--are all amongst the picturesque features by which the Christmas time is commonly marked in these islands. To be sure, the kind of seasons seems altogether to have abandoned us in which the ice furnished a field for those diversions during a period of six weeks; and the days are gone when fairs were held on the broad Thames, and books were printed and medals struck on the very pathway of his fierce and daily tides. Even now as we write however, in this present year of grace, old Winter stands without the door in something like the garb in which as boys we loved him best, and that old aspect of which we have such pleasant memories, and which Cowper has so well described: "O Winter! ruler of the inverted year! Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled; Thy breath congealed upon thy lips; thy cheeks Fringed with a beard made white with other snows Than those of age; thy forehead wrapt in clouds; A leafless branch thy sceptre; and thy throne A sliding car indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along thy slippery way!" In looking over a description of London we have met with a quotation of a passage from Fitz-Stephen, an old historian of that city, in which he gives a quaint description of these familiar sports, as they were practised in King Henry the Second's day on the large pond or marsh which then occupied the site of what is now Moorfields. The passage is short and we will quote it.