necessary for everybody to specialise in their occupations, so special amusements become more and more the rule. No longer does a gentleman excel at hunting and hawking, archery, swordsmanship, the lute, the improvisation of verses, and a dozen other accomplishments. To-day he has time only for golf, or cricket, or lawn-tennis, or what not. Even in the field of sport competition is too keen to allow of excellence in more than one branch, save in the case of a few astonishing persons, whose renown is the best evidence of this condition of affairs.
Therefore it is very easy to-day for two people to talk with pernicious effect upon a third; and as conversation, if it is pleasant, tends to follow what some people, among them myself, call "the line of least resistance," this disaster is a common one.
I have often speculated as to which is the worst shop. For a long time I thought it was the golfer's variety, but my opinion was altered by a discussion based on the performances of league teams. Hunting shop is very generally hated, though I suspect this hatred to be the result of jealousy. Chess shop is dreary enough, but no worse to a person who does not understand that so-called game than, say, musical shop to one who knows nothing of classical music. And the shop
