day. No matter what popular lecturer was speaking in the
Amphitheater, the passer-by would find that same serious company. I
used to pass them while going to my home and coming from it several
times each day. On one occasion I stopped and struck up an acquaintance
with a tall old gentleman who always wore a high hat and a long
double-breasted coat. I learned that he was the President of a Bank
among the mountains of Pennsylvania, and that he had come to Chautauqua
suffering from nervous prostration, making him utterly unable to do
business and scarcely desiring to live. He passed the croquet court, sat
down, and was invited to play. He began and found himself, for the first
time in many months, actually interested in doing something. He began to
enjoy his meals and to sleep at night. All that summer he played
croquet, never listening to a lecture, and at the end of the season went
home almost well. From that time croquet became more than his
recreation, almost his business. He told me that there were others like
himself who found health and a new enjoyment of life in the game. When
the ground was needed for the new business block, the courts were
removed to the ravine on the other side of the grounds, near the
gymnasium. About that time croquet was developed into a more scientific
game, a sort of billiardized croquet, with walls from which a ball
would rebound, and arches a quarter of an inch--or is it only an eighth
of an inch?--wider than the ball. To find a name for the new game they
struck off the first and last letters, so that croquet became Roque, and
in due time the Roque Club arose, with a group of players who live and
breathe and have their being for this game. People come from far, and I
am told, to attend its tournaments at every season.

There is also a Quoit Club meeting on the ground near Higgins Hall,
beside the road leading up College Hill.

The Young Woman's Club is for those over fifteen years of age, while the
Girl's Club has its membership between eight and fifteen, meets in its
own Club House near the roque courts, and is enthusiastically sought by
those no longer little girls, yet not quite young women.

Wherever one walks around Chautauqua he is sure to see plenty of boys in
blue sweaters bearing on their bosoms the monogram in big letters C. B.
C, initials of the Chautauqua Boys' Club. They too have their
headquarters near the athletic field and find something doing there all
day long.

[Il