For a few weeks he played cricket, but without reverence. During a match he kept up (_sotto voce_, of course) a running commentary of philosophy which, according to our ethics, was vulgar. I shudder to think what he would have done if Westminster had adopted baseball. On one occasion the captain of the eleven took upon himself to point out to Basil Norman the error of his ways. The worthy demigod deplored Norman's habit of lying on the grass during practice and inventing couplets on the various members of the team. The captain also said that, providing he would take the game seriously, there was a future for him as a cricketer. Whereupon Norman, from his recumbent position, misquoted most of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, unblushingly attributing Hamlet's indecision towards living to his doubts of himself as a cricketer. When he finished he rose to his feet, and our comments were frozen at the sight of his face. His cheeks had a ghastly pallor and his eyes were brilliant, but with a fixed, glaring intensity. And as we looked his expression changed--the color returned with a glow of warmth to his skin, and his eyes were gray and humorous. Being boys, we forgot about it as quickly as it had happened. The next Saturday we played Charterhouse, and though the score was heavily against us, Norman gave the finest exhibition of batting I have seen in public-school cricket, scoring a century and winning the match for us. He was frail but lithe, and with an air of aplomb batted the offerings of Charterhouse to all points of the compass. At the finish of the game we crowded around him, but he smiled a little wearily, and shook his head. "I am finished with cricket," he said. Bewilderment, then anathema, broke like a thunder-shower upon the head of Basil Norman. We pleaded; we argued; we threatened; then we used language which possessed the merit of forcefulness and frankness. We called him a swine, a rotter, a skunk, and an absolute cad. Some one ventured the opinion that he was a perfect stink, and we all stood about him like the Klu Klux Klan trying a negro malefactor. "Gentlemen," he said--and there was a delightful touch of irony in the word--"you have come to bury, not to praise, me; yet, unlike Cæsar, I am not ambitious." "Swine!" said Smith tertius (or was it quartus?). "In spite of the witty comment of me learned friend," said Norman, after the manner of the leading counsel of the day, "I have always held the opinion that life is a thing to be sipped, not drunk. I have played cricket--_veni, vidi_, I scored a century! I would not spoil me appetite, milords, by overgorging." "Your conduct," said Grubbs, the captain, "is rotten. It shows that you don't give a fig for the honor of the school. If you want to be a pig, you can wear the cap of one." (We all knew what he meant, and admired him frightfully for his venture into the quagmire of metaphor.) "We will send you to Coventry until you come to your senses."