If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”

He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges—yellow for Princeton and red for Harvard—passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.

And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such “how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific memorial of antiquity—seen from without a mighty circular wall of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators—on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.

Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings—-for this American game is much more complicated than English Rugger—its goal-posts and its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a minute record of the game.

The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.

Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.

The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange, demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey—the growl rising to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.

The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”

And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of musketry. Then—crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.

I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety thrilling minutes—which, with intervals and stoppages for the attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours—how the battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of victory, how Princeton drew level—a cyclone from the other side!—and forged ahead—another cyclone—how man after man went down like an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters—all this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.

“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.

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