“I want a fellow like you, Rutter, to get as nearly as possible 100 per cent. out of himself in life; and I should like to think that—what?—say 10 or 20 per cent. of the best of you came from this place. Yet you might have learnt to bowl as well on any local ground. And I wonder if we’ve taught you a single concrete thing that will come in useful in the bush.” “I might have been a pro. by this time,” said Jan, set thinking of his prospects in his father’s life-time. “I certainly was more used to horses when I came here than I am now.” “It isn’t as if we’d taught you book-keeping, for instance,” continued Heriot, pursuing his own line of thought. “That, I believe, is an important job on the most remote stations; but I doubt if we’ve even fitted you to audit books that have been kept for you. The only books we _have_ rubbed into you are the very ones you’ll never open again. And what have you got out of them?” “I can think of one thing,” said Jan—“and I got it from Mr. Haigh, too! _Possunt quia posse videntur_—you can because you think you can. I’ve often said that to myself when there was a good man in—and sometimes I’ve got him!” “That’s good!” exclaimed Heriot. “That’s fine, Jan; you must let me tell Haigh that. Can you think of anything else?” “I don’t know, sir. I never was much good at work. But sometimes I’ve thought it teaches you your place, a school like this.” “It does—if you want teaching. But you——” “I’d learnt it somewhere else, but I had it to learn all over again here.” “You always have—each time you get your step—that’s one of the chief points about promotion! You may have been schoolmastering for fifteen years, but you’ve got to learn your place even in your own house when you get one.” That touch put Jan more at his ease. “And you may have been in the Eleven two or three years,” said he, “but you’ve got a new job to tackle when you’re captain. They say there’s room at the top, but there isn’t room to sit down!” “_That_ was worth learning!” cried Heriot, eagerly. “I’m not sure it wasn’t worth coming here to pick up that alone. And you’ll manage your men all right, though I daresay they’re not any easier out there than here. That’s all to the good, Rutter.” “But suppose I hadn’t been a left-hand bowler?” Jan grinned; it had struck him as a poser. “Well, you’d have come to the front in something else. You did, you know, in other things besides cricket. It’s a case of character, and that was never wanting.” But if he had not been an athlete at all! That was the real poser. Heriot was glad it was not put to him. It would have been unanswerable in the case of perhaps half the athletes in the school. What would Goose have been? “Then there’s manners,” said Jan, who could warm up to a discussion if he was given time. “But I doubt I’m no judge of them.” “They’re the very worst criterion in the world, Jan. The only way to use your judgment, there, is not to judge anybody on earth by his manners.”