The policeman answered, “North against South—­Sports.”

The foreigner was informed, but not satisfied.  He pointed all round the assembly with a circular sweep of his hand; and said, “Why?”

The policeman declined to waste words on a man who could ask such a question as that.  He lifted a large purple forefinger, with a broad white nail at the end of it, and pointed gravely to a printed Bill, posted on the wall behind him.  The drifting foreigner drifted to the Bill.

After reading it carefully, from top to bottom, he consulted a polite private individual near at hand, who proved to be far more communicative than the policeman.  The result on his mind, as a person not thoroughly awakened to the enormous national importance of Athletic Sports, was much as follows: 

The color of North is pink.  The color of South is yellow.  North produces fourteen pink men, and South produces thirteen yellow men.  The meeting of pink and yellow is a solemnity.  The solemnity takes its rise in an indomitable national passion for hardening the arms and legs, by throwing hammers and cricket-balls with the first, and running and jumping with the second.  The object in view is to do this in public rivalry.  The ends arrived at are (physically) an excessive development of the muscles, purchased at the expense of an excessive strain on the heart and the lungs—­(morally), glory; conferred at the moment by the public applause; confirmed the next day by a report in the newspapers.  Any person who presumes to see any physical evil involved in these exercises to the men who practice them, or any moral obstruction in the exhibition itself to those civilizing influences on which the true greatness of all nations depends, is a person without a biceps, who is simply incomprehensible.  Muscular England develops itself, and takes no notice of him.

The foreigner mixed with the assembly, and looked more closely at the social spectacle around him.

He had met with these people before.  He had seen them (for instance) at the theatre, and observed their manners and customs with considerable curiosity and surprise.  When the curtain was down, they were so little interested in what they had come to see, that they had hardly spirit enough to speak to each other between the acts.  When the curtain was up, if the play made any appeal to their sympathy with any of the higher and nobler emotions of humanity, they received it as something wearisome, or sneered at it as something absurd.  The public feeling of the countrymen of Shakespeare, so far as they represented it, recognized but two duties in the dramatist—­the duty of making them laugh, and the duty of getting it over soon.  The two great merits of a stage proprietor, in England (judging by the rare applause of his cultivated customers), consisted in spending plenty of money on his scenery, and in hiring plenty of brazen-faced women to exhibit their bosoms and their legs.  Not at theatres only; but among other