presumably too much excited to allow of their coming without peril to closer quarters. Loud and eager were the cries as the balance of the match shifted this way and that--while Zeus, in Homeric phrase, ‘held the cords of battle even’--such as ‘Play up,’ ‘Well played,’ ‘Back up, will you?’ ‘Off side,’ ‘Well fouled,’ first one player and then another being held to cover himself with an eternal weight of glory or of ignominy. At last there remained only ten minutes--eight minutes--six minutes to the call of ‘time.’ The score of the two houses stood at three goals each. The wind had somewhat abated. A fine rain was beginning to fall. It became clear that whichever side obtained the next goal, if any were obtained, would win the match. Not to have been educated at a public school is not to understand the thrilling, enthralling excitement of such a moment. In some sense a house match is more exciting than a match between rival schools; for all the players are intimately known to all the spectators, and every incident is criticised not only in itself, but in relation to the player who is concerned in it. It would need the pen of a Thucydides depicting the scene in the great harbour at Syracuse to convey an idea of the conflicting emotions and expressions and the energetic actions by which the partisans of one house or the other testify their own vivid interest in the match. Nor is any occasion of human life fraught with reminiscences so terrible of mistakes that are made. Lifelong friendships have been formed--friendships, too, I am afraid, have not seldom been broken--by the events of a house match. It is difficult for the most Christian mind to forgive, quite impossible to forget, the mistake which lost the match. There are elderly gentlemen leading quiet respectable lives in remote parts of the country who cannot now meet after fifty years without exchanging words like these: ‘You remember that catch;’ ‘My dear fellow, why did you let that ball go through your legs?’