19 SEPTEMBER 1868, Page 3

The girls have taken to cricket,—a game which, but for

the petticolts, which are not favourable to good running and good fielding, is a thousand times superior to that languid croquet, though, of course, it excludes flirting, being a game in earnest. At a girls' school at Chautry, near Frome, the pupils play at cricket in a "special dress,"—and it is said that the best cricketers are "almost invariably the best scholars." But if this is so, it can only be a matter of accident. The immemorial experience of boys' schools shows amply that there is no law of necessary or even highly probable connection between excellence at cricket and excellence in scholarship. Energy is the only quality necessarily favourable to both, and energy is too often limited to departments, and not abundant enough to overflow from the physical to the intellectual, and Mee versti.