THE HOME FARM.

177

past. Alas! this is already a reminiscence of fifty years ago.

TOWN HALL FROM THE

HIGH STREET.

To those who care more about pigs than poetry

or history, the Home Farm will be interesting.

L

Splendid cattle are raised here, immense beasts that take the best prizes at agricultural shows.

To return to romance, you need not look for Herne's Oak, for it has disappeared long ago. Read Harrison Ainsworth's novel of "Windsor Castle" if you want to remember the Demon Hunter who appeared with the horns of a fallow deer on his head. Give time to see the Park well, then return to the town (p. 177), noticing on the market-place the figures of Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, her husband.

ETON.

After seeing a good deal of the Forest, there is plenty of time, during a summer afternoon, to visit Eton, where the beautiful grounds, the Playing Fields, and the College of Henry VI. clothe with splendid traditions the boyhood of those who are trained here, and are expected to carry forward by their own careers the name and the fame of their country. The river winds by this park, its banks shaded by the fine elm trees that are planted in stately avenues and clumps around the cricket lawns. Nothing is lacking at Eton that should make a boy manly by exercise, and gentle with those manners " that are not idle, but the fruit of loyal nature and of noble mind."

On a day when the eight-oar outrigger boats as they race, swinging up the current to Surley Hall, are watched by the humbler craft, and all the stream is

gay with glancing oars, or when a great cricket or football match is being played, Eton is seen at its best.

Until comparatively lately, the "knowledge of mankind," or rather, of boy nature, was the chief instruction a lad at Eton could hope to receive. A different view of the practical necessities and responsibilities of teaching has been taken during the last two decades. Latin verses are not now regarded as the all-in-all necessary for after life. The classical lore which used to be supposed to be the chief nurse of a vigorous mind is seen to have occupied too much of that mind's malleable moments. The education is now a very real one.

It is fortunate that the games-the rowing and the physical training generally-have been even further encouraged. Not only are cricket grounds more numerous than ever, but there are also racket courts and fives courts, the last in such numbers that it is no longer necessary, as it was in my time, to tell off the small boys to race for the possession of them for the benefit of their seniors.

Formerly the quickest runners among the youngsters who sat nearest the door were in great requestWhy? Because the seniors had to march out of chapel decorously when the service was over, but it was possible for the little ones near the entrance to walk out with sufficient solemnity until the antechapel's stairhead was reached. Then came a rush of white-collared, bare-headed boys, their bounding

bodies clad in black round jackets, all descending in an avalanche down the stone steps, to spring off below at utmost speed to secure the eight courts which then afforded the only chance of a game of fives. As one whole "half" (as we insisted in calling one-third of each year) was emphatically "fives half," that game being the rage, it may be understood in what importance the small boys' speed was held.

This game, as played at Eton, had its origin in the fact that balls were thrown against the walls formed by the chapel and two of the great buttresses that rise high at intervals to support the "thrust" of the stone-vaulted roof originally intended for the chapel, but never executed. The end of a stairway balustrade encroaches a little on the court so formed, and to hit a ball so that it flies back against this projection is one of the master strokes in the game. You then get it "into pepperbox," out of which it is very difficult to strike it. This "pepperbox" you will see repeated from the original chapel court, in all the newly built fives courts, and the circumstance gives a curious illustration of how a game becomes fixed from some accidental cause.

But we must not speak of the chapel as a vestibule to the fives courts. Enter by the old stair, and you will see in the ante-chapel the armorial bearings of those "Eton fellows" who have fallen on the field of battle in defence of their country. The church, with