The boys in the cities, and especially in the suburban towns, have a very much gayer time than their fathers did twenty years ago. When a man of middle age now visits his old college, or, indeed, any athletic field, the fact is impressed upon him with great and ever-increasing force that he was born two score years too soon. In my boyhood, which was not so very long ago, town ball on the commons and baseball on a rough and unprepared field were about the only games of a general nature that we had. Of course there was a brief season for shinney, a little while for marbles, and in the hottest weather of midsummer we languidly indulged in mumble-the-peg. But we had no athletic fields in the sense that they exist to-day for general sports, while the fascinating tennis had not been introduced, and football as it is played to-day was unknown. We were therefore, judging by present-day standards, pretty badly off.
By the real country I mean those sections where the boys live on farms or in villages not influenced by close contact with the people from large cities. In such places, and I am writing in such a place, the boys do not seem to have a very gay time; but as they do not know that their sports so impress an on-looker, they are not unhappy about the matter. Just across the village street from the house in which I write is the village school (Academy it is called in high-sounding phrase), and the play-ground about it is bare in some spots, high grown with weeds in others, while great stones and small lie around in an abundance that menaces the security of every step a fast-running urchin takes. The boys on one side of the yard are playing baseball at this moment, and on the other side the girls, with shrill cries that express all at once delight, apprehension, and downright fear, are playing prisoner's-base. The boys do not have a "diamond" for their game, but the field is laid out in an irregular way that must have been determined partly by chance and somewhat by necessity. The pitcher stands a few feet in front of a maple-tree, and the catcher is so close to a rail fence that every passed ball goes into the ploughed field beyond. The ball is so frequently lost in this field and in the weeds in the school-yard that quite half the time of the game is spent in searching for it. The bats are clumsy things, that seem too heavy for the youngsters to wield with ease and accuracy; but as the pitching is not fast the batters succeed in hitting the ball as often as they miss it. And every time there is a hit there is a mighty scrambling in every part of the field, as the right-fielder appears to think it his duty to cover third base, and the first-base man displays an ambition to capture flies in the left field. The smaller the score, I believe, in both the professional and amateur worlds, the better the game. But in the baseball games in the real country the opposite is held to be true, and if less than twenty runs on a side are made the game is counted to have been a failure.
These games at the Academy are not played continuously, but begin before school in the morning, then at morning recess, then during the dinner hour, and are finished in the afternoon recess. After school, with whoops and cries of divers sorts the youngsters disperse to their homes, some of which are miles away. Several years ago they all walked home, but now the majority of them go to and fro on bicycles. In watching my neighbors of the school and their goings and comings I have discovered where the discarded bicycles that have gone out of fashion in town disappear to. They are taken to the country, and there the lads in the cowhide boots in winter and bare feet in summer pedal them up hill and down, alike ignorant of and indifferent to the fact that their much-cherished wheels are out of style.
The games the real country boys play are few, and would not be exciting to the lads who exercise on the Berkeley Oval; but they are entirely wholesome and harmless, and serve just as good a purpose as they would if they were in what more sophisticated people call good form. Fun is, to a great extent, a matter of education, and the same standard will not serve to measure the amusements of all classes alike. This is a most fortunate fact; and when I consider it I doubt whether in my own youth I may not, after all, have had in my limited range as much genuine sport as the lads I see in my neighbors' lawns, throwing off their gayly striped blazers preparatory to trying their skill in the tennis-court that has just been marked out.
[THE DAISIES.]
BY JOHN VANCE CHENEY.
Daisies, once, in noonday dream,
Heard I gossip by a stream,
Secrecies too sweet to name;
'Mong them, daisies, how you came
By your shining skyey faces,
Where you learned these magic paces.
On a night, far, far away,
Certain stars that loved to play
In the pond across the way,
At a signal—so they say—
Put their beams out; what is more,
One by one they slipped ashore.
When their mates look from the sky.
Now we know why every eye,
Up and down this fairy ground,
Plays go-sleepin' oh, so sound!
Eyes and hearts of summer day,
Daisies, you have run away.