He was up on his studies for Friday, and so he tried to read a story in a magazine, stretching his long form on the window-seat and holding the pages close to the pane in the dim white light. But the story failed to win his interest, and after a while he arose, found his rules book, a pad of paper and a pencil and began to make lines and circles and crosses. Lots of times, lying wakeful in bed, Jim had concocted quite marvelous plays in his mind. At least, they had seemed marvelous at the time. Now he proposed to set them down on paper and see what they really looked like. It proved to be a most entertaining, even absorbing, occupation. The plays he had figured out in bed, or, at least, the few he could remember now, weren’t at all startling when put to the test. Indeed, few of them were original even to Jim, and those that were transgressed some rule of play. A perfectly gorgeous end-run looked like a world-beater until it dawned on its inventor that it depended for its effectiveness on the presence of a back between tackle and end and that if the back put himself there one of the other line-men would have to drop out. But difficulties were made to be overcome, problems to be solved, and as soon as one diagram had been proved valueless Jim tore off a sheet from the pad and began all over again. When it was almost too dark to see he heard Clem’s steps in the corridor and gathered the discarded sheets up very quickly and stuffed them in a pocket. He suspected that trying to discover football plays not already discovered was a puerile pursuit, and he didn’t want Clem to catch him at it. What he did not have time to do, however, before the door opened was to tear off the top sheet of the pad on which he had just finished the plan for a forward-pass. So he dropped the pad face-down beside him, and when Clem entered he was innocently gazing through the rain-washed pane at the dripping trees and sodden turf below. “Hello,” said Clem. “Why the gloom?” “Too lazy to get up,” replied Jim. Clem put the lights on and viewed his room-mate curiously. “Probably,” he had thought, “the poor duffer’s sort of blue and lonesome.” And, being sorry, he was prepared to “eat dirt,” if necessary, to put things back on something like the old footing. But Jim was thinking of the last play he had fashioned. It had looked good to him, although there had not been time to go over it thoroughly after completion. He wished that Clem had delayed his arrival by another five minutes; or would take himself out again so that he could study the new play at his leisure. Consequently, when Clem looked for pathos in Jim’s face he didn’t find it. Jim looked anything but lonesome and unhappy. Sitting in the dark and staring out onto a rain-drenched world, which would have given Clem the dumps in no time, appeared to have an animating, even cheering, effect on his room-mate. Clem grunted as he turned to hang up his cap.