He prefers to talk about the form displayed during the afternoon by his House captain in a school match, or ruminate on his own shortcomings in a recent House match. Games seem to me to lose half their charm when they are taken so seriously that a boy contemplates suicide because of his failure in a House match. I might give a hundred lectures in Big School on any subject under Heaven and very few would voluntarily attend, but if I suggest giving a few hints on how to train for games there wouldn't be a vacant seat. I am certain this making a fetish of games is too much of a good thing. There is a limit even to keenness. I love watching a fierce senior final House match and all school matches. I love going "all out" when I am playing any game, but I certainly object to treating it as if it were a religious ceremonial, or rather a display before my Supreme Judge and that on my merits or demerits I shall be saved or damned everlastingly. Quite the most enjoyable days of this term have been those wild, wet, windy afternoons when I have expended all my energies dashing up and down the shore in that peculiar game, half rugger, half hockey, which is only played at Radchester, but I don't go back to my rooms and weep if I play badly, or preen myself like a peacock if by some lucky chance I give an exhibition beyond the normal. This has been a better term than last, if only because of the three new men on the staff, all of whom are younger than I am. It was pleasant to watch them first of all roundly chafe at the limitless number of rules and restrictions placed upon us all, and gradually succumb to the tradition and become unquestioning, staunch adherents of a system against which their better judgments first taught them to rebel. One excitement of the last month has been the visit of the Inspectors: they are due once every five years and are supposed to be selected with scrupulous care. They are fêted for a week and shown everything at its most abnormal and best: it is no fair test at all. For one whole week no boy dared to "rag" even such a pitiable ass as Pennefeather, lest the Head Master and Inspectors should suddenly come in. Richards having carefully worked out an admirable lesson on the Siege of Syracuse meticulously went through it every hour with his form for the whole period on the off-chance and, as luck would have it, no Inspector came near him. I was not going to change my curriculum for any of the old dodderers, and they called on me daily. The English expert was a gentleman, and simply sat down and took notes of my methods all the time I was teaching, while the mathematical inspector did all the work for me and told me how to teach factors, without so much as worrying to ask how I got on or watching me display my talents at all. These inspections are merely farcical. Their report was one long succession of "very good," "brilliant," "astonishingly capable," and so on.