It would be impossible for the 'followers' to keep up the pace of the game for the whole hundred minutes during which it lasts. It is usual, therefore, to give them places for two alternate quarters, and make them follow during the others.

In Melbourne there are, beside the Senior Association, the 'Senior Second Twenties Associations,' the 'First-rate Junior Association,' and the 'Second-rate Junior Association,' which play under the Association rules. What is called the 'Third-rate Junior Association' consists chiefly of a multitude of clubs of lads, who make all the public parks and vacant lands resonant on a Saturday afternoon with games so interlaced one with another that the visitor is at his wits' end to distinguish where one begins and where another terminates. Yet the players themselves toil on without confusion, though, as everybody seems in some matches to be captain of his team, and spends his whole breath in screaming his instructions to everybody else, it is impossible to understand how they do it.

In the Senior Association great care is taken to discourage touting for players. No player is allowed to play with more than one club, and no player is allowed to change his club unless with the express and written consent of the permit committee, after having produced satisfactory reasons for the change he proposes to make. But on no account whatever will a transfer be permitted after midwinter, when the competition for premiership becomes keen, and touting for players might be expected to appear and grow aggravated.

A player can change his club only by showing that he has changed his residence so considerably that he could not be expected still to play with his previous club, a fact for which that club must vouch in writing. Also if he can bring a written certificate that his own club does not propose to select him again to play in its team, he can change. Otherwise he must continue loyal to his own club.

There are few accidents in the Australian game; for some years past no serious hurt has happened where the rules of the Association have been enforced, though it would be too much to expect that in a city like Melbourne, where 3,000 footballers turn out to play every Saturday afternoon, reckoning the 134 recognised clubs alone, there should never be a mishap or a death. But, as the national poet Lindsay Gordon has put it in some doggerel rhymes -

'No game was ever yet worth a rap For a rational man to play. Into which no accident, no mishap, Could possibly find its way.'

And football, as now played in the southern colonies of Australia, has as few accidents as cricket, a game which has not of late increased in popularity throughout Australia, for the employment of fielding under a summer sun during the height of the cricketing season is distinctly monotonous, and the more scientific the game becomes the less is there for the spectators to see. A few maiden overs soon tend to thin the crowd, and though people may be interested to read next morning in the papers that a stout batsman guarded his wicket for four or five hours, they would rather read about it than sit a whole afternoon in the heat to see him do it.

Football is beyond a doubt the national game in Australia. The schoolboy anticipates the season and extends it long after the time for cricket is duly arrived. The public who have languidly attended the matches where bowler and batsman have slowly fought out a three-days' contest awake with a keen interest to the fact that football has begun - football with its sharp contests always settled in some definite way within the two hours; always sprinkled here and there with comic incident for a laugh; always quick and moving, and with picturesque changes of colour, at short intervals presenting some critical moment when a champion gives a new complexion to the game - football, all animation and life, finds vastly increasing favour as compared with the slow and steady dignity of cricket. Of the two perhaps football is the better for a national game. There is no other like it to teach the eye to be quick and the will ready to decide. Instead of being the mother of accidents it is in part their cure, for the youth who has learnt the courage and address of the football field is one whose nerves are ready to meet an emergency, and whose wits are rapid to devise a course of safety.

Moreover, it can more than hold its own in comparison with all other sports as a training for generous and unselfish co-operation.

The Australian game may in one sense be called a compromise between the English Association game and that of the Rugby Union, for it unites many features of both; but it has likewise new points of its own. Here and there an Australian player is heard to growl that there is too much field umpire about it. And indeed that functionary is plentifully in evidence. But then, as the majority of players say, in such a game you must trust your umpire, and if he does not abuse his autocratic powers, the more summarily everything is decided the smarter is the game; and if he does make crops of mistakes, they will be on the average as much in favour of one side as in that of the other, unless wilful partiality is displayed

Such things can be left only to the test of experience, and experience seems to have shown in Australia that the new game entirely goes with the national taste. Apparently it is now only in the early stage of a lusty existence.