or soda-water, filling up the glass, and if you take enough
you are "high" and feel like a rolling ball. It is the thing to take a
"high-ball" after every nine holes in golf. Then after the game you
bathe, and sit and drink as many as your skin will hold. I got this from
a professional golf-teacher in charge of the ---- links, and hence it
is official.

The avidity with which the Americans seize upon a sport and the
suddenness with which they drop it, illustrating what I have said about
the lack of a national sporting taste, is well shown by the coming of a
game called "ping pong," a parlor tennis, with our battledores for
rackets. What great mind invented this game, or where it came from, no
one seems to know, but as a wag remarked, "When in doubt lay it to
China." Some suppose it is Chinese, the name suggesting it. So
extraordinary was the early demand for it that it appeared as though
everybody in America was determined to own and play ping pong. The
dealers could not produce it fast enough. Factories were established all
over the country, and the tools were ground out by the ten thousands.
Books were written on the ethics of the game; experts came to the
front; ping pong weeklies and monthlies were founded, to dumfound the
masses, and the very air vibrated with the "ping" and the "pong."

The old and young, rich and poor, feeble and herculean, all played it.
Doctors advised it, children cried for it, and a fashionable journal
devised the correct ping-pong costume for players. Great matches were
played between the experts of various sections, and this sport, a game
really for small children, after the fashion of battledore and
shuttlecock, ran its course among young and old. Pictures of adult
ping-pong champions were blazoned in the public print; even churchmen
took it up. Public gardens had special ping-pong tables to relieve the
stress. At last the people seized upon ping pong, and it became common.
Then it was dropped like a dead fish. If some cyclonic disturbance had
swept all the ping-pong balls into space, the disappearance could not
have been more complete. Ping pong was put out of fashion. All this to
the alien suggests something, a want of balance, a "youngness" perhaps.

At the present time the old game of croquet is being revived under
another name, and tennis is the vogue among many. Among the fashionable
and wealthy men polo is the vogue, but among a few everything goes by
fads for a few years. Every