Uncorking the Emotions.

Only once a week is he licensed to uncork his emotions and come down to earth—with a thud. Saturd'y! Football! Coatless, collared but collarless, breathless, sockless, and practically pantless, he sentences himself to half-a-day's hard labour for the privilege of tucking an oval bag of wind under his wing and getting his features pushed into the mud for his pains; but it is moments like these, virile reader, which have made the Umpire, forgive me, the Referee; and even if the leather-snatcher's thatch is a mating place for worms, and he looks like a clay model by Epstein, before it has dried, “A man's no mug for a’ that,” as Bob McBurns, the Scottish front-ranker, might have remarked.

It certainly is true that, as the English schoolboy wrote, the inhabitants of New Zealand are all blacks, if not in actuality, then in spirit, for even the infant Enzed kicks his feeding bottle neatly into touch, dribbles with easy facility, and questions the referee's decision like a veteran when she announces the order of the bath. Every real New Zealander, for the term of his snatcheral life, either pursues a football or tells others how to do it from the grandstand; and every male Maorilander of youthful years carries his All-Black (toe)-cap on his boot.