I enjoyed the evenings at the L.A.C. very much indeed, and I gradually improved till Perry decided that I had better enter for one of the evening handicaps. “It will accustom you to the feel of it,” he said. “You’ll have to get over the strangeness before you do anything; and there’s your handicap to be thought on. As an unknown you won’t have your fair start at first; but after you’ve lost your heat for a month of Sundays, then you’ll be on your proper mark and may get on. You’re not a flyer and very like never will be—you ain’t got the physic; but you’ll do a bit, I dare say. And there’s hope for a mile, if you come on next year. No good for a quarter nor yet a half—too punishing. Your ’eart wouldn’t stand it.” Thus this able and honest man encouraged me cautiously and I obeyed him, and in due time appeared to contest my heat in a hundred yards’ handicap. It was exciting, but it didn’t last long. I took a preliminary spin and then, curiously enough, a thing happened that quite put me off for the moment. You must know the L.A.C. ground ran along one side of a railway cutting and on the other side, running, in fact, parallel with the athletic grounds, was a cemetery. And now, just as I was going to have a second preliminary spin, there came across the railway cutting the exceedingly mournful sound of a funeral bell tolling. Somehow I felt that while on one side of the line was a crowd of excited and eager men full of life and hope and joy, and others, like myself, also full of life and hope and joy, going to run in a competition and exert their wonderful energies to the utmost—while this was happening upon one side of the railway cutting, a scene of a very different nature was going on upon the other. And I got a sort of fancy they were burying a young man in his eighteenth year, like myself—a man who only a few days before was full of fight, and enjoying life and hoping no doubt some day to be somebody worth talking about. And now, instead of taking the world by storm and getting knighted even, or other honours, here was the unfortunate chap being tolled into the earth under the weeping eyes of a heartbroken mother and other relations. The reality of the thing was fearful, and it was rather sad in a way, too, because it did me no good to have my mind distracted in this manner just before I was called upon to battle against four other men, all considerably older than I was myself. In fact they had to rouse me and call me to the starting-post, where the other competitors had already assembled. There was no man at scratch in my heat, but a great and powerful athlete called Muspratt, who received four yards from scratch, was the best runner of the five. I got eight yards, which was only four from Muspratt and not enough; and of the other three men in the race, one, who was startlingly fat to be a sprinter, had nine yards and one had ten.