As for my own experience, I went down after my election and Travers himself came to see how I shaped. At Merivale I had been a sprinter and had done well up to two hundred yards, and since I came to London I had seen Harry Hutchings—the greatest sprinter who ever lived and of course a professional champion. Therefore I decided to go in for that branch of the pedestrian’s art. I bought my costume, which was entirely black, like Dicky’s, and a pair of spiked running shoes and a black bag to carry them in. Then I went down one evening after office hours with my friend, and he introduced me to Nat Perry and his son, Charles Perry. Nat Perry was the hero of many a hard-won field, and immense and dogged courage sat upon his bronzed and clean-shaved countenance. Many hundreds of athletes had passed through his hands to victory or defeat, as the case might be, and he was a master in the art of judging an athlete’s powers. As the friend of Travers he welcomed me with great kindness, heard that I wanted to be a sprinter, but seemed doubtful whether I was the sort of build for that branch of running. “You look more like a half-miler or miler with them legs,” he said, casting his eye over me critically but kindly. “And you’re on the thin side. You want to put on some flesh. But you’re young yet.” I told Nat Perry that I hoped to put on some flesh and that I was prepared to follow his advice in everything. We came out on to the track presently, and I ran and Perry watched. But he kept very calm about it and I had a sort of feeling he wasn’t much interested. Presently he said: “You don’t begin running till you’ve gone fifty yards. Start running from the jump off.” He asked another man, who was training, to show me how to start; because his own athletic days were, of course, at an end, and he could not show me in person. But the other man most kindly came over and showed me how to get set and how to start like an arrow from a bow, which is half the art of sprinting. After the trial was over Nat Perry said that it was impossible to prophesy anything until I had shaken down and found my feet on the cinders. “You may be a runner or you may not,” he told me. “I’ve seen bigger duffers than you shape into runners. You work hard for a month and get up your appetite and eat all you can pack away. Running or no running, the exercise in the open air’s what you want, and plenty of it.” He rubbed me down after I had had a shower bath and gave me a locker for my things. He was a good man besides being so famous, and everybody thought a great deal of him at the L.A.C. His son was also an exceedingly clever trainer. In course of time I was introduced to a few of the stars of the club, with whom, of course, Travers mixed on terms of perfect equality. They were all brilliant men, and their knowledge of athletics and times and great feats of the past filled me with interest and respect.