For more than twenty years I had not heard it, but at that moment it pealed and pealed, and pealed through my consciousness, as if all the bells of Kendal Church were ringing it. Over and over I heard it. My heart beat to its shrill music, my fingers 323 tattooed it on the bed cover, I could hardly lie still. Why had it come to me at this hour? I had forgotten it for so long—so long. Doubtless its memory had been evoked by Lilly’s cheerful resolute exclamation, “What a game it will be!” For it was easy for me to unconsciously think of this brave child, playing up any good or honorable game of life, to the last moment of that great game, when
“Death holds the odds,
Of his unequal fray.”
And “if a woman is game as she is mild, and mild as she is game,” a late great writer says, “that should satisfy any of us.”
Many and many a time since that happy hour, in straits of all kinds, I have been encouraged and strengthened by this plucky rallying cry of English schoolboys, and I have said to my failing spirit, “Now, Amelia, the game is hard, and the odds are against you, but you cannot sneak out because of that. ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’”
About six weeks ago, I felt as if I really must give up. I had been writing for five years without even a day’s rest, and my present task of recalling, and feeling the past all over, had thoroughly exhausted me. “I can do no more,” I said, and with old, tired eyes, full of unshed tears—for old eyes dare not weep—and a sad heart, scarcely beating, I fell upon my bed, and was at once in a deep sleep. I was awakened by a crowd of schoolboys from Professor Stone’s school which is just above my house. They were singing or chanting all together some school slogan. I know not what, but it awoke in my soul, the old battle cry of the classes on their English playground,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
And the cheerful, resolute noise was like old wine to my heart. I rose confidently, and went to my study and wrote for nearly three hours without any feeling of weariness. In that time, I got over the hard bit of road, that had so discouraged me, and 324 the next morning I could sit down cheerfully at my desk, and repeat my usual grace before writing:
“I say to my Maker,
Thanks! for the day’s work,