As I might have expected, the impetus to train came from the college. I was rescued from a fit of depression by a college-mate, a German, who wanted some one to train with. At school he had run three miles in remarkable time; but later, when an officer in the German army, his horse had rolled over him at the finish of a steeple-chase, and the accident had knocked out his heart; so he was going to try to sprint. I advised him against all training, and the groundsman shook his head. Yet he was set upon showing the Englishmen in Balliol that a German could be a sportsman. This was no idle talk, as I found later, when he fainted in the bath after a fast hundred, and failed by no one knows how little of coming to. We were soon joined by a third Balliol man, a young Greek poet, whose name is familiar to all who are abreast of the latest literary movement at Athens. He was taking up with athletics because of his interest in the revival of the ancient glories of Greece. When I asked him what distance suited him best--whether he was a sprinter or a runner--he answered with the sweet reasonableness of the Hellenic nature that any distance would suit him that suited me. A motlier trio than we, I suppose, never scratched a cinder-path. Yet the fellows in our college seemed almost as interested as they were amused; and we soon found that even so learned a place as Balliol would have been glad to bolster its self-esteem by furnishing its quota of "running blues." What was lacking in the way of stimulus from the university was more than made up for by the spontaneous interest of the fellows in college. The rudimentary form of athletics is in meetings held by the separate colleges. These occur throughout the athletic season, namely, the autumn term and the winter term; and as hard on to a score of colleges give them, they come off pretty often. The prizes are sums of money placed with the Oxford jeweler, to be spent in his shop as the winners see fit. In America, the four classes, which are the only sources of athletic life independent of the university, are so moribund socially that it never occurs to them to get out on the track for a day's sport. It is true that we sometimes hold inter-class games, but the management of these is in the hands of the university; they are inspired solely by a very conscious attempt to develop new men, and to furnish the old ones with practice in racing. The vitality of the athletic spirits in the English colleges is witnessed by the fact that an Oxford college frequently meets a fit rival at Cambridge in a set of dual games just for the fun of it.