This, in substance, is the answer to all questions of this class. I have played at cricket or shinney, or boated, since I was nine years old. During the last three years and a half, I have played at one or the other almost every day. I have played at shinney, or hockey, as we call it, all through the winter, through snow a foot deep, and when the thermometer was below zero; I have played at cricket in summer with the thermometer at 90, and I have never yet seen one serious accident. The fact is, that I have a theory that Nature loves young men and boys, and love to aid them in their sports. She sends her ice and snow to educate them and make them hardy, while we are sitting by the stove and abusing the weather. She won't let them be hurt half as much by a blow or a fall, as older people who do not love her half as well. She breaks the young one's fall, and herself puts the plaster on his little fingers. She is delighted at every conquest that these young children of hers make over herself, just like some big boxer she stands, who is teaching his boy to box. He feints and threatens and looks big, but who so pleased as he when the young one gets in his one two!
Again, the danger is little or nothing to the daring and courageous. The fellow that isn't afraid of the ball, is scarcely ever hurt. He defends himself with eye and hand. The coward is the one most likely to get hurt. I think that there is just enough risk in these games to engender a manly contempt for pain, and a bold handling of a danger. If the cricket ball were a soft affair, it would be a game for babies not boys.
Let us then take a hint from the sporting world, and turn to the use of the many that which has formed the only redeeming feature of a few. The good that these manly games do, should not be confined to a small class, but should be diffused among the whole community, for the sporting world has something to say to all of us. It rouses the scholar from his desk, shakes him, and tells him that much study is a weariness to the flesh, and that the fields are alive with song. Out then he must come, and leave his musty books.
It comes to the business man in the crowded city, and babbles of green fields, nudges Mr. Sparrowgrass with its elbow, and tells him to take Mrs. S. and the children into the country.