My favourite game was fives. We had a splendid fives court, and the game was played in a manner altogether peculiar to Winchester; now I believe--like so much else--abandoned. We used a very small ball, hardly bigger than a good-sized walnut, and as hard as if made of wood, called a “snack.” And this was driven against the wall by a bat of quite peculiar construction. It was made, I think, of ash, and there were only two men, rivals, who could make it. It was about a yard long, the handle round, and somewhat less than an inch in diameter. It then became gradually thinner and wider, till at about the distance of six inches from the extremity it was perhaps an inch and a half wide, and not thicker than half-a-crown. Then it expanded and thickened again into a head somewhat of the shape of an ace of spades, some three inches across and half an inch thick. The thin part was kept continually well oiled--in such sort that it became so elastic, that the heavy head might almost be doubled back so as to touch the part nearer the hand. It will be understood both that the difficulty of striking a bounding ball with this instrument was considerable, and that the momentum imparted to the small hard ball by the blow was very great indeed. It is true that accidents occasionally, though very rarely, happened from a misdirected blow. But it does not seem necessary that the old bat should be abandoned, for our judicious grandsons might play with great comfort and safety in helmets! Of course I, like most of my contemporaries, left Winchester--and indeed subsequently left Oxford--as ignorant of any modern language, save English, as of Chinese! And as for music--though Oxford and Cambridge are the only universities in Europe which give degrees in music--it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with very rare exceptions, to have taught an undergraduate, or a boy at a public school, music, would have been thought much on a par with teaching him to hem a pocket-handkerchief. And here the present generation has the pull to a degree which it perhaps hardly sufficiently recognises!