Smeed understood it was a command. He turned submissively and approached with embarrassed steps. Face to face with these superior beings, tanned and muscular, stretched in Olympian attitudes, he realised all at once the hopelessness of his ever daring to associate with such demi-gods. Still he stood, shifting from foot to foot, eyeing the steps, waiting for the solemn ordeal of examination and classification to be over. "Well, Hungry--what's your name?" Smeed comprehended that the future was decided, and that to the grave he would go down as "Hungry" Smeed. With a sigh of relief he answered: "Smeed--John Smeed." "Sir!" "Sir." "How old?" "Fifteen." "Sir!!" "Sir." "What do you weigh?" "One hundred and six--sir!" A grim silence succeeded this depressing information. Then some one in the back, as a mere matter of form, asked: "Never played football?" "No, sir." "Baseball?" "No, sir." "Anything on the track?" "No, sir." "Sing?" "No, sir," said Smeed, humbly. "Do anything at all?" Little Smeed glanced at the eaves where the swallows were swaying and then down at the soft couch of green at his feet and answered faintly: "No, sir--I'm afraid not." Another silence came, then some one said, in a voice of deepest conviction: "A dead loss!" Smeed went sadly into the house. At the door he lingered long enough to hear the chorus burst out: "A fine football team we'll have!" "It's a put-up job!" "They don't want us to win the championship again--that's it!" "I say, we ought to kick." Then, after a little, the same deep voice: "A dead loss!" * * * * * With each succeeding week Hungry Smeed comprehended more fully the enormity of his offence in doing nothing and weighing one hundred and six pounds. He saw the new boys arrive, pass through the fire of christening, give respectable weights and go forth to the gridiron to be whipped into shape by Turkey and the Butcher, who played on the school eleven. Smeed humbly and thankfully went down each afternoon to the practice, carrying the sweaters and shin-guards, like the grateful little beast of burden that he was. He watched his juniors, Spider and Red Dog, rolling in the mud or flung gloriously under an avalanche of bodies; but then, they weighed over one hundred and thirty, while he was still at one hundred and six--a dead loss! The fever of house loyalty invaded him; he even came to look with resentment on the Faculty and to repeat secretly to himself that they never would have unloaded him on the Dickinson if they hadn't been willing to stoop to any methods to prevent the House again securing the championship.