thus preceded steel skate-blades; and the term "skate' is said to be derived from a Low-German word for "shank-bone," introduced into East Anglia by Flemish refugees.

Skating is always bracing and exhilarating; to some the rapidity of the motion through the keen frosty air which it affords is almost ecstatic. Speed Skating, which doubtless came before Figure Skating, requires a combination of skill, strength, and endurance. It is a sport most popular where exist the best facilities for it; particularly among the lakes, on the Norfolk Broads, and on slow rivers and artificial waterways. No better opportunities are afforded than on the Great Level of the Fens, which is traversed by four considerable rivers, intersected by drainage canals, and presents an area of 1,200 square miles easily frozen, with possibilities of continuous runs of thirty or forty miles. Here Skating is very popular, and nowhere is there a prettier winter scene to be found than on the frozen Ouse at St. Ives.

To an Englishman sport is as the salt of life-particularly the field sports of country life. He does not consider any game or pastime a true sport unless the playing of it calls for considerable bodily exertion, and some amount of endurance; and if there is also a spice of danger in it so much the more he likes it.

It is to the manly exercises, particularly to the field sports of Old England, that so much of the national vigour and hardihood are due. Wherever the Englishman makes his home he fails not to indulge his sporting instincts-he plays Cricket on the plains of Australia with the zest of a Cambridge undergraduate, or Football on the veldt of Africa with the enthusiasm of a Rugby schoolboy-and it is honestly believed that he will maintain his dominant position among the. nations of the earth only so long as that instinct is un

impaired, so long as the founts of his athleticism are left unsapped.

The modern American citizen, true to the old stock, when returned to his home in the States after a visit to the motherland, cannot recall his reminiscences of the old country without his thoughts reverting to the pleasures of its sports:

"On a cloudy morn I hear the horn,
The fox steals from his lair,
The baying sound of eager hound
Comes echoing through the air.
From find to kill, o'er vale and hill,
I watch the red-coats fly;
All unsuppressed my 'View Halloo!'
When hounds are scampering by.

And now I seem to see the stream
Where trout were wont to rise;
Disciples of 'Old Izaak,'

Their hats bedecked with flies.

A little splash, a sudden dash,

I see a silvery gleam;

Five minutes' play, and a lusty trout

No longer swims the stream."

In conclusion, let it be observed that Sportsmanship, if true, remains untainted by inhumanity, and is never brutalised by callousness. The latest movement is to promote a Bill in Parliament to put down the pursuit of animals under unnatural conditions. The proposed Spurious Sports Bill would prohibit such pastimes as the hunting of carted deer, the coursing of bagged rabbits, and the shooting of birds from traps. Every true English Sportsman will agree that this is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

UNIV. OF