The II Earl

  A FATHERS ADVICE If a sportsman true you’d be Listen carefully to me. . . Never, never let your gun Pointed be at anyone. That it may unloaded be Matters not the least to me. When a hedge or fence you cross Though of time it cause a loss From your gun the cartridge take For the greater safety’s sake. If twixt you and neighbouring gun Bird shall fly or beast may run Let this maxim ere be thine “Follow not across the line.” Stops and beaters oft unseen Lurk behind some leafy screen. Calm and steady always be “Never shoot where you can’t see.” You may kill or you may miss But at all times think this: “All the pheasants ever bred Won’t repay for one man dead.” Keep your place and silent be; Game can hear, and game can see; Don’t be greedy, better spared Is a pheasant, than one shared.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN NO FURKING ALLOWED! BUT, THERE IS POST-GAME SPONGE CAKE. WELCOME TO THE PECULIAR TRADITIONS OF “THE WALL GAME” AT ENGLAND’S SUPERELITE ETON COLLEGE A knot of young men in striped shirts shove up against one another, heads down and grunting as other boys sitting atop a wall jeer and urge them on. The scene resembles a rugby scrum, or that moment in American football when a running back smacks into the opposing line—except that the struggle goes and on and on, the ball hidden beneath a muddy tangle of arms and legs, until the unacquainted spectator realizes that what he is witnessing is basically the whole game. This organized hour of “constant, hand-to-hand, Homeric conflict,” as the British writer Arthur Clutton-Brock described it in the book  Eton , is known as the wall game, and it’s been played for centuries at Eton, Britain’s most exclusive boys’ school.  Illustrations by Lachlan Campbell from  Eton Colours: An Essential Il...