We should recognise that cricket is a game for the few; the majority of boys can never make good cricketers.  And happy are those schools which are near a river and can provide an alternative exercise in the summer, which does not require exceptional quickness of eye and wrist and does provide a splendid discipline of body and spirit.  In the summer it is well to exempt all boys from cricket, who have really a taste for natural history or photography.  Summer half-holidays are emphatically the time for hobbies, and it is a serious charge against our games if they are organised to such a pitch that hobbies are practically prohibited.  The zealous captain will object that such “slacking” is destroying the spirit of the house.  We must endeavour to point out to him that the unwilling player never makes a good player, and that such a boy may be finding his proper development in the pursuit of butterflies, a development which he would never gain by unsuccessful and involuntary cricket.  House masters too are apt to complain that freedom for hobbies is subversive of discipline, and to quote the old adage about Satan and idle hands.  That there is risk, is not to be denied.  But you cannot run a school without taking risks.  Our whole system of leaving the government largely in the hands of boys is full of risks.  Sometimes it brings shipwreck; more often it does not.  For in the majority of cases the policy of confidence is justified by results.

There is one way of wasting time that is heartily to be condemned, the waste involved in looking on.  I am inclined to think that if all athletic contests took place without a ring of spectators, we should get all the good of games and very little of the evil.  Certainly professional football would lose its blacker sides if there were no gate money and no betting.  Few men or boys are the worse for playing games; it is the applause of the mob that turns their heads.  But I am afraid I am not logical enough to say that I would forbid boys to watch matches against another school; the emotions that lead to the “breathless hush in the Close” are so compounded of patriotism and jealousy for the honour of the school, that they are far from ignoble.  But I would not have boys compelled to watch the games against clubs and other non-school teams.  Above all, if they watch, they must have a run or a game to stir their own blood.  The half-holiday must not be spent in shivering on a touchline and then crowding round a fire.

That the athlete is a school hero and the scholar is not, is most certainly true.  The scholar may once in a way reflect glory on the school by success in an examination, but generally he is regarded as a self-regarding person, who is not likely to help to win the matches of the year.  But the hero-worship is not undiscriminating; conceit, selfishness, surliness will go far to nullify the influence of physical strength and skill.  Boys’ admiration for physical prowess is natural and not unhealthy.  The harm