Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and I got both him and the headmaster to write to my father urging him to allow me to stop another year, not only for my own good (interview A), but for the well-being of the house (interview B). The double appeal was successful: it was settled that I should stay for another year, and then go up to King’s College, Cambridge. As I would be over nineteen when the next scholarship examination came round, I was ineligible on account of advanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next vexing my contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm on the sunny slopes of antiquity. I had no notion of using this extra year of life (for so it appeared then) for idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at subjects that would eventually “tell.” I meant also, with a suspicion of priggishness, to make the house streak a meteor-like path across the starry sky of school. We were going to be a model of enlightenment (this was the ambition); we were to win the racket house-cup, and the fives cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, and the singing cup (for, like the Meistersingers, every house competed in singing), and two vocal quartettes, triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup. There it was--forty boys were to be drilled into winning every event of this immense pentathlon. A sixth cup, possibly within the range, was the cricket cup; but in the matter of cricket the house generally was no more than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five cups seemed within the limits of probable achievement, and who knew but that a breezy eleven, rather ignorant of cricket, except for the presence of the best left-hand bowler in the school, might not effect some incredible miracle? Never has anybody’s head been so stuffed full of plans as was mine when I went back a year later than was reasonable for this series of inconceivable excitements.