The McGill meet was only two weeks off, and Frank began his training in earnest. Twice a day he swam the furlong, first at a moderate gait and then quickening the stroke until he was traveling at good speed throughout the distance. Burton came up from New York and spent a portion of two days with him, and, before the coaching was over, Frank had the satisfaction of beating out his old teacher of the crawl stroke. "You're too good for me now," gasped Burton as he pulled himself out of the water at the end of the race. "I'll have to leave you to the tender mercies of Hopkins himself." The night of the meet finally came around, and the building was all too small to hold the hundreds who crowded to the pool doors. Every seat was sold long in advance and standing room was crowded almost to suffocation. The attraction was, of course, Hopkins, who had been taking the measure of every swimmer at his distance that he had met, and who was heralded as the greatest swimmer in the world over the furlong distance. After Wilson had won the hundred and Hobbs had lost the fifty-yard contest, Hopkins sauntered carelessly from the dressing room, clad in a black silk racing suit. He proved to be a tall and powerful young man, heavily muscled. Alongside of him, as the two stood perched on the pool end, Frank looked very slender, but there was a suggestion of concealed strength in the latter's well-rounded limbs and of vitality and staying power in the deep chest. "Two-twenty yards even!" sang out the referee. "Eight lengths and sixty feet. Hopkins, the Olympic champion on the left for McGill; Armstrong on the right for Yale. Ready! Get set! GO!" At the word, both bodies shot through the air and hit the water like one. The champion used a long, rather slow but powerful trudgeon which was peculiarly mixed with the crawl in the leg action; Armstrong used a quicker crawl, in which the legs were scarcely bent at the knee, but were thrashed rapidly in a very narrow angle. The crowd expected the champion to pull away at once, but when the two turned at the far end of the pool, they turned at exactly the same instant. Down to the starting point the swimmers came, moving with great speed, but still the Yale man stayed with his big opponent with grim determination, and even finished the fifty a fraction of a second in advance of his Canadian opponent, shooting away on the second fifty still in the lead. Twice more the swimmers covered the length of the tank without relative change in position.