“Oh, I see. Much obliged, Pug. You whack it through a sort of goal, eh?” “Into a net, to be more exact. Do you skate well?” Lamar laughed again. “About the way a hen swims,” he said. “Then your chance of making the hockey team will be small,” answered Pug, with a good deal of satisfaction, I thought. “Oh, I’ll learn skating. I’ve tried it once or twice. I reckon it’s not so hard, eh?” Pug smiled ironically. “Possibly it will come easy――to you,” he said. “Hope so. Anyway, I’m going to have a stab at it. You don’t happen to know where I can borrow some skates, then?” We didn’t, and Lamar went on talking about hockey until Pug gathered up the chessmen and went off. When he had gone Lamar grinned at me and said: “Corking chap, Pug. So sympathetic.” Then he got his crook-handled umbrella out of the closet and began pushing my glass paper weight about the floor with it, making his feet go as if he was skating, and upset the waste basket and a chair and got the rug all rumpled up. A couple of days later I asked him how he was getting on with hockey, and he said. “Fine!” He said the candidates hadn’t got the sticks yet; that they were just doing calisthenics. After that he reported progress every day, but we didn’t pay much attention to him, because if we did he would never stop, and neither Pug nor I was interested in hockey. But afterwards I learned that Lamar used to spend hours on the gymnasium floor, outside of practice periods, shooting a puck at a couple of Indian clubs set up to make a goal. There wasn’t any ice before Christmas to speak of, and so the rinks weren’t even flooded.