GIRLS AND LAWN TENNIS.
A plea from a schoolboy has reached me on the subject of lawn tennis as contrasted with cricket. He laments that when lie comes home for the summer holidays he finds himself greatly inferior to his sisters—and other people's sisters—in the art and craft of striking a lawn tennis ball. The girls, he says, are taught by the best instructors and have the advantage of a multitude of courts—in some girls' schools as many as two score, some hard courts, some grass. The boys, on the other hand, are occasionally permitted to play, perhaps three or four times a term, on some master's grass court. It is perfectly true that most modern girls play lawn tennis in the orthodox way, and therefore presumably the right way. They have developed a school of the game, and most of the boys play extremely badly and in the wrong manner. It may, as some mothers hold, be very good for the boys to find themselves inferior to their sisters at at least one ball game ; but the contrast is at least surprising. On a hundred country courts you see the boys cutting the ball very much in the fashion prevailing in the 'eighties—and not doing that well—while the girls might have modelled themselves on a Suzanne or even a Tilden. This contrast of merit is beginning to appear also at Wimbledon and in most of the smaller tournaments held about the country. Should we listen to the schoolboy's plea for more lawn tennis at schools ?
W. BEACH THOMAS.
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