Then just before the whistle went for half-time, just when he was at his busiest, he had a curious, distinct picture of Uncle Samuel, the red apple tree, and Hamlet lying on the floor of the studio waiting for his rat. People talk about concentration and its importance, and nobody who has ever played a game well but will agree that to let your mind wander at a very critical moment is fatal; but this was not so much the actual wandering of a mind as of a curious insistence from without of this other picture that went with the scene in which he was figuring. It was like the pouring of cold clear water upon his hot and muddled brain. It was also as though Uncle Samuel, in his thick, good-natured voice, had said to him, “Now, look here, I know nothing about this silly game that you’re trying to play, but I’m here to see you go through it, and the two of us together it’s impossible to beat.” The whistle went before he had time to realize the effects of this little intrusion. He stood about during the interval talking to no one, wishing he were dead, but armoured in a cold resolve. After all, he would not write to Uncle Samuel and tell him that he had been left out of the school fifteen because he had not played well enough. No one as yet had scored. The teams seemed to be very evenly matched, which was a bad thing for the school. Everyone in the school team was depressed, and the men in the “Rest” were equally elated. If the whole truth were known, the play in the first half had been very ragged indeed, but, as Mr. Thompson explained to the lady visitor, “You mustn’t expect anything else early in the term.” She made the fatuous remark that “after all, they were such _little_ boys,” which made Mr. Thompson reply, with more heat than true politeness required, that his boys, even though they were all under fourteen, could on their day show as good a game as any public school, to which the lady visitor replied that she was sure that they could—she thought they played wonderfully for such little boys.