The Mayor, in the chair, was a mild old gentleman who knew nothing whatever about football and had probably never seen a football match; but it was essential that the meeting should have august patronage, and so the Mayor had been trapped and tamed. On the mere fact that he paid an annual subscription to the golf club certain parties built up the legend that he was a true sportsman with the true interests of sport in his soul. He uttered a few phrases such as "the manly game," "old associations," "bound up with the history of England," "splendid fellows," "indomitable pluck," "dogged by misfortune" (indeed, he produced quite an impression on the rude and grim audience), and then he called upon Councillor Barlow to make a statement. Councillor Barlow, on the Mayor’s right, was a different kind of man from the Mayor. He was fifty and iron-grey, with whiskers, but no moustache; short, stoutish, raspish. He said nothing about manliness, pluck, history, or auld lang syne. He said he had given his services as chairman to the Football Club for thirteen years; that he had taken up £2000 worth of shares in the company; and that, as at that moment the company’s liabilities would exactly absorb its assets, his £2000 was worth exactly nothing. "You may say," he said, "I’ve lost that £2000 in thirteen years. That is, it’s the same as if I ’d been steadily paying three pun’ a week out of my own pocket to provide football matches that you chaps would n’t take the trouble to go and see. That’s the straight of it! What have I got for my pains? Nothing but worries, and these!" (He pointed to his grey hairs.) "And I ’m not alone; there’s others; and now I have to come and defend myself at a public meeting. I ’m supposed not to have the best interests of football at heart. Me and my co-directors," he proceeded, with even a rougher raspishness, "have warned the town again and again what would happen if the matches weren’t better patronised. And now it’s happened, and now it’s too late, you want to _do_ something! You can’t! It’s too late. There ’s only one thing the matter with first-class football in Bursley," he concluded, "and it is n’t the players. It’s the public—it’s yourselves. You ’re the most craven lot of tomfools that ever a big football club had to do with. When we lose a match, what do you do? Do you come and encourage us next time? No, you stop away, and leave us fifty or sixty pound out of pocket on a match, just to teach us better! Do you expect us to win every match? Why, Preston North End itself—" here he spoke solemnly, of heroes—"Preston North End itself in its great days did n’t win every match—it lost to Accrington. But did the Preston public desert it? No! You—you have n’t got the pluck of a louse, nor the faithfulness of a cat. You ’ve starved your Football Club to death, and now you call a meeting to weep and grumble. And you have the insolence to write