Luckily, boy-nature is too strong for theory.  And we admit, for the sake of truth, that physical education is not so entirely neglected among us as the absence of popular games would indicate.  We suppose, that, if the truth were told, this last fact proceeds partly from the greater freedom of field-sports in this country.  There are few New England boys who do not become familiar with the rod or gun in childhood.  We take it, that, in the mother country, the monopoly of land interferes with this, and that game laws, by a sort of spontaneous pun, tend to introduce games.

Again, the practice of match-playing is opposed to our habits, both as a consumer of time and as partaking too much of gambling.  Still, it is done in the case of “firemen’s musters,” which are, we believe, a wholly indigenous institution.  We have known a very few cases where the young men of neighboring country parishes have challenged each other to games of base-ball, as is common in England; and there was, if we mistake not, a recent match at football between the boys of the Fall River and the New Bedford High Schools.  And within a few years regattas and cricket-matches have become common events.  Still, these public exhibitions are far from being a full exponent of the athletic habits of our people; and there is really more going on among us than this meagre “pentathlon” exhibits.

Again, a foreigner is apt to infer, from the more desultory and unsystematized character of our out-door amusements, that we are less addicted to them than we really are.  But this belongs to the habit of our nation, impatient, to a fault, of precedents and conventionalisms.  The English-born Frank Forrester complains of the total indifference of our sportsmen to correct phraseology.  We should say, he urges, “for large flocks of wild fowl,—­of swans, a whiteness,—­of geese, a gaggle,—­of brent, a gang,—­of duck, a team or a plump,—­of widgeon, a trip,—­of snipes, a wisp,—­of larks, an exaltation.—­The young of grouse are cheepers,—­of quail, squeakers,—­of wild duck, flappers.”  And yet, careless of these proprieties, Young America goes “gunning” to good purpose.  So with all games.  A college football-player reads with astonishment Tom Brown’s description of the very complicated performance which passes under that name at Rugby.  So cricket is simplified; it is hard to organize an American club into the conventional distribution of point and cover-point, long slip and short slip, but the players persist in winning the game by the most heterodox grouping.  This constitutional independence has its good and evil results, in sports as elsewhere.  It is this which has created the American breed of trotting horses, and which won the Cowes regatta by a mainsail as flat as a board.