An American at Oxford

, may be laid, I think, primarily, to the influence of climate. Through the long, temperate sum

as shut down on the heated earth, the English horizon gives light for the recreations of those who have labored all day. In the winter the result is the same, though the cause is very different. Stupefying exhalations rise from the damp ea

ens," he replied, "the cold and draught are quite endurable. When you get too cold reading, put on your great-coat." I asked him what he did when he went out of doors. "I take off my great-coat. It is much warmer there, especially if one walks briskly." Some days later, when I went to dine with my tutor, my hostess apologized for the chill of the drawing-room. "It will presently be much warmer," she added; "I have always noticed that when you have sat in a room awhile, it gets warm from the heat of your bodies." She proved to be right. But when we went into the dining-room, we found it like a barn. She smiled with repeated reassurances. Again she proved right; but we had hardly tempered the frost when we had to shift again to the drawing-room, which by this time again required, so to speak, to be acclimated. Meanwhile my tutor, who was of a jocular turn of mind, d

the sport is nipped in the bud. To teach our oarsmen the rudiments of the stroke we resort to months of the galley-slavery of tank-rowing. Our track athletes begin their season in the dead of winter with the dreary monotony of wooden dumb-bells and pulley-weights, while the baseball men are learnin

anuary to July, about six months, or did so before Mr. Lehmann brought English ideas among us; the English 'varsity crews row together nine or ten weeks. Our football players slog daily for six or seven weeks; English teams seldom or never "practice," and play at most two matches a week. Our track athletes are in training at frequent

ear, bright American sky-the sky that renders it difficult for us to take the same delight in Italy as an Englishman takes, and leads us to prefer Ruskin's descriptions to the reality-cheers the American at

the English climate has the opposite effect. In all contests that require sustained effort-distance running and cross-country running, for example-we are in general far behind; while during the comparati

e team that ran against Yale at New Haven, said as much after a very careful study of American methods; but he was not convinced that our thoroughness is quite worth while. The law of diminishing returns, he said, applies to training as to othe

and physically. Contests are arranged without what American undergraduates call diplomacy; and they come off without jockeying. It is very seldom that an Englishman forgets that he is a man first and an athlete afterwards. Yet admirable as this quality is, it has its defects, at least to the transatlantic mind. Even more, perhaps, than others, Englishmen relish the joy of eating their hearts at the

with each other. So the graduate steps in to moderate the ardor of emulation, and often ends by keeping alive ancient animosities long after they would have been forgotten in the vanishing generations of undergraduates. The Harvard eleven wants to play the usual football game; but it is not allowed to, because a committee of graduates sees fit to snub Yale; the athletic

rs exhorting men to back the teams. The spectator is thus given an important part in every contest, and after a 'varsity match he is praised or blamed, together with the members of the team, according to his deserts. Yale may outplay Harvard, but if Harvard sufficiently out-cheers Yale she wins, and to the rooters belong the praise. In baseball game

d breadth of a man's experience there are only two or three things one would wish so humbly as the devotion that makes it possible. Such earnestness is the quintessence of Americanism, and is probably to be traced to the signal fact that in the struggle of life we all start with a fighting chance of coming out on top. Whatever the game, so long as it is treated as a game, nothing

he men who play golf, lawn and court tennis, rackets and fives, who swim, box, wrestle, and who shoot on the ranges of the gun club, the total of men schooled in competition reaches eighty to one hundred. A simple calculation will show that when so many are exercising daily, few are left for spectators. Not a bench is prepared, nor even a plank laid on the spongy English turf, to stand between the hanger-on and pneumonia. A man's place is in the field of strife; to take pa

sed in America as of a prophet of despair demanding the abolition of inter-university contests. As yet the contests have not been abolished, and do not seem likely to be. Might it not be argued without impertinence that the best means of doing away with the excesses in question is not to have fewer contests, but more of them? If our universities were divided into r

fluences of climate in internati