The good people who write these edifying stories never seem to think whether it was wise for mamma to forbid Johnny to climb a tree.  Monkeys are never forbidden to do so, and I seldom hear anything of their falling off.  Poor people’s children climb trees, and there does not seem to be an extraordinary increase of juvenile mortality on this account.  What should you say if some hard-hearted person, myself for instance, were to say to the dear mother of little Johnny, “Dear Madam, you yourself, I grieve to say, were the cause of Johnny’s accident; you have habitually prevented him from doing anything which would quicken his perceptions and strengthen his limbs.  He must not soil his pinafore, he must not get his hands dirty, and above all he must not play at any games which make his hair untidy, or tear his clothes.  In fact, you have forbidden him to do precisely those things which Nature prompted him to do.  He has generally been very obedient, you say, and therefore his bodily powers have become weaker instead of stronger.  Well, the temptation came, the unused and untrustworthy limbs were summoned to act, his consciousness of doing wrong enfeebled him still further, and made them still more nervous.  He went up the tree, and the natural consequence was, that he fell.”

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.