Reminiscences of Quoit-playing.

195

delivering it is to swing and let it go without any slope to the right or left-let it meet the air full.

There are many pleasant recommendations to quoits. It is a fine appetising game; it is terribly destructive of luncheons. It exercises without fatiguing the player. Moreover, every one has his full turn; the worst player has an innings as long as the best. Nobody is kept waiting about. Each delivers his quoit in turn, and then walks towards the other end, but not in the direct line, unless he wishes to have the back of his head cut open by the rest of the flight. A blow from a quoit is no joke, but accidents are very rare in this game.

When I walk down Oxford Street, and see, near the bottom, chains and clusters of beautiful new polished quoits in one of the shopwindows, I always think of the paddock where I have played so many hundred games, or the bottom down in the low meadows by the slow stream where the ground was moist even in the height of summer, and where the dogs used to snuff about for inaccessible water-rats while we played. The only drawback to the spot was a beast of a bull, who used sometimes to come up with a suspicious air of interest in our gestures. The best place was

196

Minor Garden Games.

the paddock, where the turf was bitten short, and feathers could be picked up beneath the neighbouring rookery. Ah me! those old garden games! I like you better than croquet. Think of bowls! What skill, what philosophical accuracy are here needed! Bah! I'll stop. My window looks out into a mews, and there is a fellow swearing at his horses enough to turn the hair of my clothes-brush gray.

Yet a word. I don't call trap-bat or archery garden games. I see others represented by "les Grâces" (the shooting of a worsted hoop off two sticks), but I don't care to stop over them. I can't either believe that any one could keep up a very long interest in Knockem-downs or Aunt Sally. I should not weep to see them die out. The young ladies who play at them are sometimes fond of slang; and, though men will often maliciously provoke it, there is nothing which sets them more against a woman than this.

Commend me, however, to swings. I hate them, and yet the enjoyment they cause to children is endless. Those great double ones which carry two, face to face, are horrible, most especially if your vis-à-vis should, as not unfrequently is the case, turn white, and be taken

poorly while uppermost. There is no escape. But if you have a garden and a convenient branch, set up a swing for the young folks ; and if you want a delightful couch, combining in itself every conceivable phase of adaptability to the most yawning, lounging, leg-stretching idler you ever imagined, hang up an Indian grass hammock for yourself in the shade, and bless the giver of this hint.

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DREAMS.

REAMS are the accompaniment of both idleness and work. They "come through the multitude of business," and occupy the lazy brain; they are associated with the sluggard and the enthusiast; they are honoured as channels of supernatural advice, and blamed as the offspring of sheer sensuality. We dream with our eyes open as well as shut-by day as well as by night. But the phenomena of dreams have defied scientific experiments and metaphysical inquiries. Now and then it seems as if some law were discovered, but the investigator is soon baulked. You fancy you can account for a dream, but you can't make one. It may sometimes be analysed, but I believe has never been composed. You do not know how it will turn out. Impress your mind strongly with this and that set of ideas, and lo, the whole slips out of the place where you put it, and another occupies

Influence upon Dreamers.

199

your sleeping thoughts. You can't cook a dream. The skilful speaker can count, with tolerable certainty, upon producing an impression something like that which he wishes upon the waking mind; but, when we sleep, we move out of the reach of his persuasive machinery. But although we cannot construct a dream, or order it beforehand, it may sometimes be directed while in progress with ludicrous effect.

Many accounts are published of the way in which the thoughts of a dreamer, once fairly committed to the dream, may be effected. He is played with helplessly. An encyclopædia will give anecdotes and references to books about dreaming, in which most absurd results have been obtained by dictating to the sleeper. A man has been made to dive from his bed under the persuasion that he was in the water, and being pursued by a shark. But this sleepWith far the

ing obedience is happily rare.

most of us-indeed, with very few exceptions -the land of dreams is a strange independent land, and our sleeping life unaccountably cut off from our waking one.

Words may waken, but they seldom influence us. We hear, and do not understand; there is a break between the minds of the