breathe the incense of applause.  But others have a clumsier hand, a slower foot, and yet they have a determination to excel, a resolution in sticking to their task that brings them at the last to a fair measure of skill.  Such a boy is already rewarded by the toughening of the will that perseverance brings:  he does not need a ribbon on his sweater.  To give the other, the natural athlete, a coloured scarf, is to run the risk of making him over-value the gifts he owes to nature.

There is no reason why a boy who excels in games should not excel in work.  The two are not competing sides of education, they are complementary.  The schoolmaster’s ideal is that his boys should gain the advantages of both.  The athlete who neglects his work, grows up with a poorly furnished mind and an untrained judgment.  The student who neglects his games, grows up without the nervous development that fits his body to be the instrument of his will, and without the knowledge of men and the habit of dealing with men which are indispensable in many callings.  It has been proved again and again that it is possible to get the advantages of both these sides of school life.  There is no reason why the playing of school games should be anything but a help to the intellectual development of a boy.

But the constant talking about games is by no means harmless, though it is true boys might be talking of worse things.  It is related that a French educational critic was once descanting to an English head master on the monotony of the conversation of English public school boys:  “they talk of nothing but football.”  But when he was asked, “And of what do French school boys generally talk?” he was silent.  But if “cricket shop” saves us from worse topics, it certainly is destructive of rational conversation on subjects of more general interest.  In great boarding schools we collect a population of boys under quite abnormal conditions, cut off for the greater part of their social life from intercourse with older people.  It is, I think, a general experience that boys who have been at day schools and are the sons of intelligent parents, have their minds more awakened to the questions of the day in politics, or art, or literature than boys of equal ability who have been at a boarding school.  They have had the advantage of hearing their father and his friends discussing topics which are outside the range of school life.  Boarding schools are often built in some country place away from the surging life of towns, where the noise of political strife and the roar of the traffic of the world are but dimly heard.  In such seclusion the life of the school, particularly the active life of the playing fields, occupies the focus of a boy’s consciousness.  The geographical conditions tend to narrow the range of his interests, and he remains a boy when others are growing to be men.  Those who have the wider tastes, are deterred from talking about them by the ever present fear of “side.”  They