essence of triumph to see the enemy scowling on their goal-line while Berney's sauntered away with the ball, and to know that he and he alone was responsible for this cleavage of the hosts. Martin walked with all the tremendous humility of glowing pride. It was the first try he had ever scored, and Moore and Spots had seen it.

That evening Moore approached him after prayers.

"Hullo, Leigh," he said. "You scored this afternoon, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Martin, making a desperate effort to conceal his satisfaction.

"Well," answered Moore deliberately, "you hadn't any business to. You're a forward and it isn't your job to cut the scrum and lurk about for the ball. They were pushing us and it was a mere fluke that they kicked too hard. Anyhow the half could have scored: it was only a matter of going two or three yards. You ought to have been in the middle, shoving like hell. See?"

"Yes."

"Well, don't lurk any more, or there'll be trouble. It isn't a forward's business to score tries. Anyone can be a 'winger': it takes a man to shove."

Moore was one of the old school of forwards. He believed in foot-work and read The Morning Post.

"So don't let me catch you loafing outside the scrum again," he concluded. "There's quite enough chaps doing that already." And he strolled away.

Moore was not a person of much imagination and he never saw that he was not going the right way to make a great forward. A word of encouragement coming on the top of this, possibly injudicious, success would have made Martin play like a devil. Instead he deliberately slacked for a week.

Indeed footer, in spite of its moments, became monotonous. Martin had to play four and often five times a week in all weathers, and very often the sides were uneven and the game, consequently, a farce, a shivery, cheerless farce in which everyone longed for the pleasant signal for release. By the end of term nobody liked the games and everybody was as sick of the fields as of the classrooms. If was not merely that the games were too frequent, but that they were scarcely ever treated as games. As the end of the term approached, bringing with it challenge cup matches for old and young, house feeling ran strong and the various teams were goaded by their prefects with relentless severity. Sometimes whole fifteens would be swiped in turn for their failure to win matches, quite irrespective of their capacity to do so: slackness could always be alleged. At Berney's, it was true, no great rigour was displayed. Had Spots been captain more blood might have been shed, but Moore, who directed the house teams, was more lenient and rarely went further than guttural abuse and threats. Being, however, himself a forward, he instituted scrumming practice in the evenings, and Martin found himself being pushed about the house gymnasium at great pain to his ears and limbs, while larger boys planted shrewd and stinging blows on the prominent portions of the losing side: it was no fun being in the back row. As he shoved and groaned in the perspiring mass, there flamed across his mind the remark of a well-meaning aunt: 'How you will enjoy the games!' Martin was not particularly weak or unathletic: his physique and taste for games were quite up to the normal, but he did not stand alone when he proclaimed to his friends his weariness with the official recreation which only doubled life's burden.

"Of course," said Caruth, after scrumming practice one night, "it's awfully good for us. Bally influence and all that. You know what the crushers say."

"And they ought to know," added Martin, "as they never play, at least not compulsorily."

"Anyhow," said Caruth, "there is one comfort."

"What is that?"

"We don't have to sweat it out like Randall's. Their pre's make them groise at it all day and all night."

"Good job. The stinkers."

Martin's sympathy with the oppressed was not yet as strong as his hatred of Randall's, the pot hunters, the unspeakable.

Work with the Terror was not always terrible: for Martin it even had its moments. He enjoyed turning out a good verse or a good translation, and he enjoyed also the commendation that it won. The Terror, whose real name was Vickers, was a young man soured by misfortune. He had meant to go triumphantly to the Bar: he had connections, he had brains, he would rise. But a financial crisis in the family had left him in despair, too old to enter for the Civil Service, too poor to attempt the Bar in spite of his connections. He had drifted, of necessity, to the arduous, responsible, and despised task of moulding the future generation. The future generation, as represented by the Lower Fifth, Classical, of Elfrey, seemed to Vickers a loathsome crew, fit only to be the victim of the sarcastic tongue on which he prided himself. He hated the elderly bloods who remained calmly and irremovably at the bottom of the form: he hated the ink-stained urchins with brains who passed through his hands on their way to higher things. The Lower Fifth he held to be an abominable form because it was neither one thing nor the other. The teaching was not mere routine, the soulless cramming of impenetrable skulls: on the other hand, it wasn't like taking a Sixth. There were times, especially in the afternoons, when the frowst of the water-warmed room, the dingy walls and desks, the ponderous horror of mistranslated Æschylus, and the unmannered lumpishness of the human boy (average age sixteen) would all combine to play upon his nerves and to rend the amorphous thing which once had been an active, ambitious soul. Wearily he vented his wrath upon the form.

His method was, as a rule, the sarcasm courteous. He lounged magnificently while he played with his victim.

"Simpson!" This to a clever but idle youth remarkable for his large, inky hands and persistent untidiness of apparel. There was something in Simpson's grimy collars and straggling bootlaces that infuriated Vickers.

"Simpson!"

"Yes, sir?"

"You owe me, I think, a rendering of Virgil."

"Please, sir, I haven't quite finished it yet, sir."

"And how much, may I ask, have you finished?"

"Well, sir, last night I had the Agamemnon chorus."

"I see, Simpson. I see."

"Please, sir, I was very busy."

"Our Simpson was busy early this morning also, I suppose."

"Yes, sir."

"At your ablutions, I presume."

Here the form would laugh: Simpson's cleanliness was a standing joke.

"Please, sir, I didn't wake up very early."

"That was very distressing."

There was a silence. "Well, Simpson?" Vickers would continue in his softest tone.

Simpson gazed moodily at the desk, digging nibs into the wood.

"Our Simpson seems fonder of water than of Maro. We must tighten the bonds between Simpson and the poet. May I say the whole of the first Georgic this time?"

"Oh, sir."

"You think the quantity excessive?"

Simpson summoned up his courage and said he did think so.

"Ah, but the verse is so beautiful," came the answer. "I couldn't deprive you, Simpson. Anyhow, you may begin your magnum opus and let me know when you have reached line two hundred."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Simpson, that will be delightful. You were translating, Grant, I think."

Vickers aimed at being a strong man and he never set a grammar paper in which he did not ask for a comment on the phrase:

"Oderint dum metuant."

"A capital sentiment, Simpson," he would say with his gentlest smile, as he mouthed out the words. But his pretensions were not idle, as was shown by the fact that he could lose his temper without becoming ridiculous. If a weaker man had called the giant Batson 'a contemptible ass,' Batson would have laughed and the form would have sniggered. But when Vickers flared up he commanded the silence of the greatest.

Vickers had a gift of phrase and Martin learned much from him, partly because he was so afraid that he always worked hard, and partly because Vickers took a fancy to