graphing a gipsy encampment, after which, mounting our ponies, we returned home after an eight hours' ride in one of the most lovely and romantic districts in England.

MANY great cricketers and most great oarsmen have come from Eton, and Etonians have played no small part among those public schoolmen who have made names for themselves in all departments of sports and games. The public may follow with interest their doings at Putney, Lord's, Queen's Club, or wherever their prowess is displayed, but for the most part are utterly ignorant of the circumstances in which their eye was trained or their muscle developed. Of Eton herself, her methods, and characteristics, something is tolerably familiar to many, but of her games-which parents sometimes think occupy too much of her attention-very little is known to the outside world. To them 'The Rafts,' 'Upper Club,' The Field,' The Wall' convey nothing, or, at best, a meaning of the vaguest description, yet to Etonians the words are full of the pleasantest associations, recalling scenes which memory

saves

Mirrors bright for her magic cave,
Wherein may steadfast eyes behold
A self that groweth never old.

Beyond the facts that turn up, with the regularity of the proverbial bad shilling, in every article on the school-that Wellington made a flattering remark about the playing fields, that George III. was never happier than when watching the boys at play, and that Canning was once a sitter' in the procession of boats-very

little is told of rowing and cricket at Eton; and the games which are peculiar to her are Greek to the uninitiated.

The present article aims at supplying some little information on both classes of games—a sketch of the special features of those which the school shares with the world at large, and an explanation of those which are its own. Under the former heading come, first, rowing, cricket, and racquets; and, secondly, beagling and athletic sports, which, though not strictly games, deserve mention in a Magazine of Sports and Pastimes.' In the second class come 'the field game,' the 'wall game,' and fives. And here I must offer a preliminary apology-to Etonians, if I have nothing to say that is new to them, and if in my endeavour to make my meaning plain I should ever introduce into an Eton game any terms other than those which tradition sanctions (say, for instance, in the field game, 'forwards' for 'bully'), and to the general reader, if in shunning the Scylla of Eton jealousy I fall into the Charybdis of unintelligibility, and leave him more mystified than ever by the intricacies of Eton games and phraseology.

One can't do two things at once, says a veracious proverbor, as the Irish orator put it, 'a man can't be in two places at once, barring he's a bird'-and no more can a boy who is not the exception to this Hibernian rule. Consequently a new boy usually decides at once to be either a wet-bob' or 'dry-bob,' and during his Eton career the oarsman has very little experience of cricket and vice versa. True, there is a nondescript pastime known as 'Aquatics' (a form of cricket which recognises very few M.C.C. rules); and a four of exceptionally courageous (not to say reckless) dry-bobs is an occasional sight on the river at the slack period of the summer term. But this poaching on another's preserves is for the most part treated with contempt by any selfrespecting individual. Passing' is the first ordeal the wet-bob' has to undergo; indeed, he is not a 'wet-bob' till he has 'passed' the examination in swimming which takes place at Cuckoo Weir and Athens-the two bathing-places. One by one the shivering row of small boys plunges in and swims (or does not swim, as the case may be) round a post some thirty yards distant, having to prove to the satisfaction of the presiding master that he can rescue himself if upset in his clothes. This precaution was found necessary when a boy was drowned some twenty years ago-and none too soon, one would suppose-for half a century earlier there was a superstition-partially based on fact-that one life would be lost in this manner every three years. A further safeguard has been instituted in the shape of watermen, who in