The prospects of the beginner are always golden. His wares are not yet for sale in the open market. He has not entered into competition with his contemporaries. A young professional makes a century during his first month of first-class cricket and is immediately the object of generous enthusiasm. The reporter can write of him as ecstatically as he will. The professional has not yet reached representative cricket. At school a slow left-hand bowler takes eight wickets for twenty-seven in a house match. He is spoken of at once as the coming man. For another season he will continue to take wickets in house matches to the delight of every one. Then he will enter the lists of representative cricket. He will play on uppers, and it will have to be decided, not whether he is a good slow left-hand bowler, but whether he is better than Evans in Buller's, and Morrison in Wilkes's. It is so easy to say of a boy of fifteen: 'Some day he will be captain of the house.' We can all of us exclaim at the beginning of a Marathon: 'What a beautiful runner that fellow is.' It is after ten miles have been run and the runners have sorted themselves out that the real race begins. It is the appreciation of this moment that ends the 'see-saw down' period and sees the start of the 'see-saw up.' It must not be imagined, however, that this process of see-saw up involves a complete moral, spiritual, and intellectual reformation; it sometimes does; more usually it means that the schoolboy looks at the same life from a different angle. His standards, his scale of values remain unaltered. He feels that he has not adjusted himself properly to their demands. He has been making an ass of himself: he has been ragging about, he has allowed opportunities to slip past him. 'It won't do,' he tells himself. 'I must stop all this. I must settle down.'