Part 5 (1/2)

We may build up as we will schemes of Education and Instruction, add science to science, learning to learning, and facts to facts; but what we shall build will be only a dead body unless it be informed by the breath of the Spirit which maketh alive. For Education which teaches a man everything but how to live to the glory of G.o.d and the service of man is not Education, but only instruction; and it is the fruit of the tree, not of Life, but of Death.

_PART II_

CHAPTER I

Romance in Games

A SHARP distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole enterprise worth while.

In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister ”I spy,” a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows what wild ancestry lends to the game an excitement not to be found in games with bats and b.a.l.l.s and nets and bails and straightforward trappings bought at shops. When you lurk in the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one who is hunting you, and to become in your turn the hunter, you are no longer a child, you are a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger or a black-fellow, according to the measure of your dreams and the nature of the latest book of your reading.

At this point it occurs to me that perhaps you who read may have forgotten the difference between ”Hide-and-seek” and ”I spy.”

Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half the players hide, and the others seek them and there's an end of it. It is an interesting game, but flat compared with ”I spy.” It has, however, this merit, that it can be played without those screams to which grown-ups are, usually, so averse. Whereas I defy any one to play ”I spy” without screaming.

Hide-and-seek is a calm game; the thing sought for might almost as well be an inanimate object: it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants'

eggs, of bears looking for honey. But ”I spy” is the game of enemy looking for enemy: it calls for the virtues of fort.i.tude, endurance, courage--for the splendours of physical fitness, for aptness, for speed.

In ”I spy” half the players hide and the others seek; but they seek not an unresisting stationary object, but a keen, watchful retaliatory terror. They seek, in shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house and conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge, and arbour, for the enemy, and when that enemy is found the seeker does not just say, ”Oh, here you are”--that ending the game. Far otherwise; the seeker in ”I spy”

goes warily, his heart in his mouth--for, the moment he sees a hider, he must shout ”I spy,” adding the hider's name. ”I spy Jimmy!” he cries, and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden one follows after--the hunted becoming in one swift terrible transition the hunter, and he who was the seeker flies with all the speed he may, across country, to the appointed ”home.” The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer and follows with yells. Grown-ups would always rather that you played hide-and-seek--and can you wonder? But sometimes they will concede to you ”I spy” rights, and even join in the sport. It is always well, in playing any game where anything may be trampled, such as asparagus beds, or broken, such as windows, to have a grown-up or two on your side. And by ”your,” here, of course I mean children. The habit of years is not easily broken, and I am so much more used to writing _for_ children than _of_ them.

Chevy Chase is a good old-fas.h.i.+oned game of courage and adventure. Does any one play it now? No child can play it _con amore_ who does not know who it was who

When his legs were smitten off He fought upon his stumps,

and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in the cup of defeat was ”Earl Percy sees my face----”

All wreathed with romance are the song-games, ”Nuts in May,” ”There came Three Knights,” and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing movement and the song of marriage-by-capture ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe to the vanquished! This is a very old game--and there are many words to it. One set I know, but I never have known the end. Little boys in light trousers and short jackets and little girls in narrow frilled gowns used to play it on the village green a hundred years ago. This is how it began:

Up and down the green gra.s.s This and that and thus, Come along, my pretty maid, And take a walk with us; You shall have a duck, my dear, And you shall have a drake, And you shall have a handsome man, For your father's sake.

My mother told me all of that song-game, and that is all of it that I can remember. She always said she would write it down, and I always thought there was plenty of time, and somehow there was not, and so I do not know the end. Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out the Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody Else now so mysteriously gets all the credit, may know the end of these verses. If he does, and if he sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.

This game of come and go and give and take is alive in France; witness the old song:

Qu'est-ce qui pa.s.se ici si tard, Compagnons de la Marjolaine?

Qu'est-ce qui pa.s.se ici si tard Toujours si gai?

Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi, Compagnons de la Marjolaine.

Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi Toujours si gais.

Et que veulent ces cavaliers, Compagnons de la Marjolaine?

Et que veulent ces cavaliers Toujours si gais?

Des jeunes filles a marier, Compagnons de la Marjolaine; Des jeunes filles a marier, Toujours si gais.