The boy who thus exhausts in ragging the residue of energy that the football field allows him, has, it follows, to be careful not to burn the candle at both ends. He has to spare himself, and to spare himself he abandons the spasmodic cribbing of his first year's summer examination for sustained, systematic methods. Now the true ethics of this subject are as little understood as those relating to any other sphere of public school life. Cribbing is generally regarded as a dishonest practice to which only the ignoble few have regular resort. The habitual cribber is as morally lost as a thief. For what, after all, is cribbing, say our aunts, but the stealing of marks from your companions. 'When you crib,' they tell us, 'and say that you are not stealing, you argue from the standpoint of the housemaid who would return conscientiously the sixpence you have left on your dressing-table, but would not think twice of filling a medicine bottle with your best brandy and handing it over to her young man.' While we are at our Preparatory Schools we are inclined to agree with this. We ourselves would never think of cribbing. At a Preparatory School it is not done. But at a Public School we learn otherwise. To the public school boy cribbing is not dishonest. It is not wrong, because it is not anti-social. There are no doubt somewhere, if we could discover them, fixed immutable standards of righteousness. But we have not found them yet. In the meantime we are content to frame conventions that alter with each generation to safeguard what we consider to be our comfort. We put a thief in prison because we are anxious to protect our property. His actions are anti-social. They are only anti-social, however, because we happen to value our property. We should not object if he took from us what we did not prize. It is thus indeed that the dustman earns his living. And the public school boy does not usually set much greater value on his marks than the housewife on her egg-shells. I remember reading several years ago a short story that appeared in _The Captain_. It was about an American who came to an English Public School. On the result of a certain examination depended the position of head boy in the house, and the American broke into the head master's study and extracted the examination paper. The theft was, however, discovered, and the American summoned to the head master's study for an interview that was the certain prelude to expulsion. This fact was made known to him. 'Waal,' he said, 'I guess that's fair. My father often said to me when a big bluff fails, it's down and out for the guy that misses.' The head master was surprised. He appreciated the difference between a big bluff and a piece of calculated deceit. He saw that the American had, because of the atmosphere of business in which he had been brought up, a standard different from his own. The American had honestly believed himself to be attempting 'a big bluff.'