In the midst of this Babel, you were expected to get your lessons as well as you could. When it came to meal-times, you went into what was called "Big Hall," where four hundred boys ate together. The beef was tough enough to make a suitcase: the milk was like chalk and water: the potatoes would have done to plaster a ceiling or cement a wall. How different it all was from the good though simple fare at home! "Want to join a brewing company?" asked the boy across the table. "What's a brewing company?" inquired Wilf. "We buy sausages and cook 'em in saucepans over the fire--when we can find a fire." "Yes, you can count me in," said Wilf. So it didn't make so much difference after that, if he couldn't eat what was set before him at the table. But usually the boys brought robust appetites to their meals, for they went in heavily for all forms of athletics. The boys who didn't make the teams had to drill in the gymnasium or run round and round an open air track a mile and a half long. If you shirked, the boys themselves saw to it that you got punished. When Wilf came home to Cheshire for the long vacations he found some poor little ragamuffins who had no fun in their lives, and started a club for them in his own house. There were no boy scouts in those days, when Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Ernest Thompson Seton were little boys themselves. It was just taken for granted that boys would be boys, and it was hoped that they would grow up to be good men, if after school hours they were allowed to run loose in the streets. But Grenfell had a different idea. He turned the dining-room on Saturday evenings into a gymnasium. He pushed aside the table and chucked the chairs out of the window. "Now any of you fellows who want to can get busy on the parallel bars," he told them, "or if you like you can go out into the back yard and pitch quoits. I'll take on anybody who wants to box with me." The boys thought it was heaps of fun. They could hardly wait for Saturday night to come, because it meant the rare sport of banging another boy in the nose, which was much more satisfactory than throwing stones at a policeman. After he was big enough, he used to go to lodging-houses where men slept who were down and out. He knew that drink had brought them low, and he wanted to show them better things to do. The saloon-keepers were against him from the start. He was depriving them of some of their best customers. "You're spoiling our business," they grumbled. At last they made up their minds they would "get" him. They collected a "gang" and one night they locked the door, backed up against it, and shouted: "Come on, young feller! We're goin' to fix you!" They rolled up their sleeves, clenched their fists, and sailed into him full-tilt like a big, angry crowd of human bees. Grenfell was ready for them. It was like a fight in the movies.