skill against the strength and skill of the monarch of rivers, and has
mastered him among the haunts of fairies and beneath the ruined towers of
feudalism. These are some of the delights that to-day end for a season.
{16}



WINTER SPORTS.


People to whom cold means misery, who hate to be braced, and shudder at
the word "seasonable," can have little difficulty in accounting for the
origin of the sports of winter. They need only adapt to the
circumstances that old Lydian tradition which says that games of chance
were invented during a great famine. Men permitted themselves to eat
only every second day, and tried to forget their hunger in playing at
draughts and dice. That is clearly the invention of a southern people,
which never had occasion to wish it could become oblivious of the
weather, as too many of us would like to be in England. Such shivering
and indolent folks may be inclined to say that skating and curling and
wildfowl-shooting, and the other diversions which seduce the able-bodied
from the warm precincts of the cheerful fire, were only contrived to
enable us to forget the state of the thermometer. Whether or not that
was the purpose of the first northerner who fixed sheep-bones beneath his
feet, to course more smoothly over the frozen sound, there can be no
doubt that winter sports answer their presumed purpose. They keep up
that glow which only exercise in the open air can give, and promote the
health which shows itself in the complexion. It is the young lady who
interprets literally the Scotch invitation "come into the fire," and who
spoils the backs of library novels by holding them too near the