"Exactly like. And that pink on the trees would do for the Westminster shirts." "Blazers and shirts," cried Grim, in disgust. "Oh! get out." "Let's get in, Grimmy, instead. You'd better see the doctor. 'Pon honour, you aren't well." "I can't help it," said W.E. Grim, resignedly, "if you haven't any soul. Yes, I'll come. I've got Merishall's work." There was a coolness that night between the two friends as they sat at the opposite sides of their common table doing their work for Merishall, and Wilson was determined to find out what was disturbing their accustomed peace. He had soon done his modicum of prose and forthwith broached matters. "Let's have this business out, Grim. It will do you a lot of harm if you keep it in." "The fact is----" began Grim, hesitating. "Allez! houp-la!" said Wilson, encouragingly. "I'm going in strong for poetry." For reply Wilson laughed as though his life depended on the effort, and Grim turned a rich rosy hue. Wilson finally blurted out-- "Grim, you're an utter idiot." "What do you think about it?" "Nothing." "I thought it would surprise you." "It has, but nothing you do ever will again. Lord, Grimmy, was it for this you chucked cricket and your chance of the house eleven?" Wilson exploded again, uproariously. "I'll tell Rogers and Jack Bourne. You a poet!" "Why shouldn't I be, you silly cuckoo?" "Why, you haven't got the cut of a poet, for one thing, and for another, I believe, next to your mother, the thing you like best in the world is a good dinner." Wilson waxed eloquent on Grim's defects from a poet's standpoint. "Your hair is as stiff as any hair-brush; you can't deny you're short and a trifle beefy; and was ever a poet made out of your material and fighting weight?" "That isn't criticism," said Grim, angrily. "No," said Wilson, bitterly. "I don't pretend to that. They are a few surface observations only. Just tell this to Rogers or even Cherry, and watch 'em curl." Wilson and Grim went to bed that night pretty cool towards each other, but in the morning Grim was obstinately bent on being the poet as he was the next week and the week after that. He wrestled with poetry morning, noon, and night, and he made himself a horrible nuisance to his old cronies. Wilson complained bitterly about their study being "simply fizzing with poetry." Grim sprang a poem or a sonnet, or a tribute or some other forsaken variety of poetry, on pretty well everything about the place. He "_did_" the dawn and worked round to the sunset. He had a little shy at the church and the tombstones, and wrote about the horse pond's "placid wave." He did four sonnets on the school, looking from north, south, east and west, and let himself go in fine style about the school captain's batting. He sent this to Phil, and Phil passed the disquisition on to me; it was very funny indeed. Not a single thing was safe from his poetry, and he cut what he could of cricket to write "tributes."