John Foe and I entered Rugby together at fourteen, and shared a study for a year and a term. Pretty soon he climbed out of my reach and finally attained to the Sixth. I never got beyond the Lower Fifth, having no brains to mention. Cricket happened to be my strong point; and when you're in the Eleven you can keep on fairly level terms with a push man in the Sixth. So he and I were friends--"Jack" and "Roddy" to one another--all the way up. We went through the school together and went up to Cambridge together. He was a whale at Chemistry (otherwise Stinks), and took a Tancred Scholarship at Caius. I had beaten the examiner in Little-go at second shot, and went up in the same term, to Trinity; where I played what is called the flannelled fool at cricket--an old-fashioned game which I will describe to you one of these days-- "_Cricket? But I thought you rowed, sir?" put in Yarrell Smith. "Yes, surely--_" "_Hush! tread softly," Barham interrupted. "Our Major won't mind your not knowing he was a double Blue--don't stare at him like that; it's rude. But he will not like it forgotten that he once knocked up a century for England v Australia. . . . You'll forgive our young friend, sir; he left school early, when the war broke out_." _Otway looked across at Yarrell-Smith with a twinkle. "I took up rowing in my second year," he explained modestly, "to enlarge my mind. And this story, my good Sammy, is not about me--though I come into it incidentally because by a pure fluke I happened to set it going. All the autobiography that's wanted for our present purpose is that I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in the footsteps (among others) of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and--well, you see the result. May I go on?_" _But although they were listening, Otway did not at once go on. Sammy had spoken in his usual light way and yet with something of a pang in his voice, and something of a transient cloud still rested on the boy's face. Otway noted it, and understood. When the war broke out, Sammy had been on the point of going up to Oxford_. . . . _Before the cloudlet passed, Otway had a vision behind it, though the vision came from his own brain, out of his own memory--a vision of green turf and of boys in white on it, a small regiment set orderly against a background of English elms, and moving orderly, intent on the game of games_. O thou, that dear and happy Isle, The garden of the world erstwhile. . . . Unhappy! shall we nevermore That sweet militia restore? _Snatches of an old parody floated in his brain with the vision--a parody of Walt Whitman--_ Far off a grey-brown thrush warbling in hedge or in marsh; Down there in the blossoming bushes, my brother, what is that you are saying? . . . The perfect feel of a "fourer "! . . . The jubilant cry from the flowering thorn to the flowerless willow, "smite, smite, smite." (Flowerless willow no more but every run a late-shed perfect bloom.)