Mamma not sleeping, so Ruffles, the chow, passed the night in my room, which he disliked intensely, so much so that when he did eventually doze off distrustfully, he had what is a rare thing with him, a nightmare of the most alarming and noisy order. I hope this Town Council business is not really keeping Mamma awake. Probably the wretched devil is quite innocent. It would be quite like Mamma to go up to him and accuse him of it. But then she couldn’t. Caught seven fish yesterday, which wasn’t so bad. They were rising well. NOAT, Friday, 29 September. Back to the old place again, and very depressed in consequence: however, I am now a full-blown specialist in history, and am allowed to send small boys on errands as I am one of the illustrious first hundred in the school. But the football is going to be awful. I came back on Wednesday. As usual, nothing is changed in the least: Bell’s opposite have discarded their hunting-horns of accursed memory for an accordion and a banjo, just as painful. What with the accordion and the cold and the noise and the discomfort and Cole, who I am up to in history, this has ceased to be a life and has become a mere existence. However, the outlook is always black at the beginning of the term. _Later._--An excellent meeting of the Art Society: very amusing. There was a grand encounter between Seymour and Harington Brown and B. G.’s unrivalled powers of invective were used with great effect. His face, his voice, everything combines to make him a most formidable opponent in wordy warfare. 1 October. Since all my contemporaries spend all their time in the Senior Reading Room with a newly-acquired gramophone, I am left alone and undisturbed, which is very pleasant. Am feeling much more cheerful now, which I attribute to a cup of hot tea. Am keeping up all the tradition by being the only person in the school with a greatcoat on. Why is it that when there is the hardest and most bitter frost no one wears a greatcoat here? I think it is so absurd, and get rewarded for my pains by catching reproving glances from the new boys, who, of course, are ultra careful, so much as to say, “You are making an ass of yourself with that coat on.” Seymour and B. G. are going to give _the_ most immense and splendiferous leaving party, which is going to be wild fun. 3 October. This morning an outrage: I am eating my morning bun, given to me for that purpose by J. W. P., when my tooth meets a stone, and half of it is broken off clean. Result, an immense jagged cavity which I shall have filled, at J. W. P.’s expense, with platinum, and set with brilliants. I am furious. Brown, a friend of mine, has hit Billing, who keeps the food shop where you get rat poison, in the stomach so that he crumpled up behind the counter: the best thing that has happened for years.