The school had already regretfully resigned themselves to the prospect of not having Pip as Captain of the Eleven, but the news that Linklater had been barred too created a storm that was not allayed for some weeks. Linklater, much to his own gratification, found himself a hero, and without ado collected around him a band of sympathisers of the baser sort, who assured him twenty times a day that he was the only "sportsman"--overworked word!--in the school, and asserted with the unreasoning logic of their kind that things ought to be "made warm" for Ellis when the summer term arrived. Pip said nothing about the matter at all. It was a way he had. He methodically made up his fixture card for the cricket season, and remarked to Ellis that if the present extraordinarily mild winter ended as it had begun, they ought to be able with any luck to get up a little net practice during the fag-end of the spring term after the Sports. But all thoughts of cricket, and indeed of every other suggestion of summer, were speedily brought to an end by the coming of the great and historic frost--subsequently known as the Hot-Water Frost--which is talked about in Grandwich to this day. It arrived rather late,--the first week in February,--and it held continuously and unrelentingly until the last week in March. Morning after morning the mercury in the thermometer outside Big School was found to have retreated unostentatiously into its bulb; day after day a watery and apologetic sun shone forth upon a curiously resonant and rigid world; and night after night the black frost came down like a cast-iron pall, repairing in a moment the feeble and ineffective ravages of the winter day. Not very far away enthusiastic persons were endeavouring to roast an ox whole in the middle of the Thames, and at Grandwich many an equally unusual and delightful pastime was improvised. There was much sliding: there was no other way of getting about; and boys and masters slid or glid, with more or less agility and immunity from disaster, to and fro between house and school for several weeks. There was a magnificent slide, slightly downhill, all the way from Big School door to the Gymnasium, which offered an exhilarating rush through the air of nearly seventy yards--an offer of which Mr. Bradshaw, accidentally discovering the existence of the slide when walking home from dinner one dark night, involuntarily availed himself.