! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the American
spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em
playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smut
an otherwise attractive landscape."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of space and free open in
the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons
there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a
kind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitation
of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after
the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the
season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to
the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold,
snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as
hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one
period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they
didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game
periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and
climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the
artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be
wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we
accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our
parents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature which
surrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids'
games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help
believing that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, for
thousands of children, of one more game."

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his
head approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt," he said. "I shall hereafter
regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear
an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor
little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with
a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts."

"They die hard," said I.

We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the
outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly
walking about.

"Why don't they _do_ something," Old Hundred exclaimed, half to
himself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.

Again Old Hundred g