But in spite of Ward, who pretended that Rugby football was an overrated amusement, I wanted to belong to the athletic set, and I started by playing footer in a thing which is most correctly called "The Freshers' Squash." In this struggle any fresher who had never played rugger in his life, but thought he would like some exercise, could play, while footer blues dodged round and took your names, if you were lucky enough to touch the ball, and booked you for the proper game. On the following day I played back in the real freshers' match, and was most tremendously encouraged before I started by hearing one man say to another that I had come up with a big reputation from Cliborough. Perhaps I was encouraged too much, or possibly I had eaten too heavy a luncheon, for whatever reputation I might have had before the game began, was effectually dispersed before we had finished playing; and Foster, who was playing three-quarters on the other side, was the man who assisted me in this dismally easy task. Four times he came right away from everybody, and once he slipped down in front of me, but on the other three occasions he simply swerved away from me and I missed him by yards. The man who had been full back to the 'Varsity XV. the year before had gone down, and Foster had put into my head the idea that I ought to have a jolly good chance of getting my blue. This match was a very rude blow, and when I put on my coat and walked out of the parks I felt that I had been very badly treated. I was not at all sure with whom I was most angry, but I had a general feeling that whatever I tried to do went most hopelessly wrong, and that I was much better fitted to sit in a dog-cart with Jack Ward, than I was to stand up in a footer-field and be made a fool of by Fred Foster. As luck would have it the first man I saw when I went into the college was Ward, and he shouted with laughter when he saw me. "I went down to the parks to see you," he said, "but for heaven's sake don't look so down on your luck. I don't see that it matters, there are other things worth doing besides trying to collar impossible people. If you don't have to play again I shall think you are thundering well out of it." If anybody had said this to me at school I should have thought that he was mad, but during the few days I had been at Oxford I had somehow or other got hopelessly mixed up. Foster wanted me to do one thing, Murray advised me to do another, Ward kept on asking me to slack, and a fellow called Dennison, whom I had met several times, seemed to think that Oxford was a tremendous joke and that the most amusing people in it were the dons.