He turns on his heel and departs in good order to his study, branded--for life, he feels convinced--as an officious busybody, a presumptuous upstart, and worst of all, a betrayer of old friends. He has of his own free will cast himself into the nethermost Hell of the schoolboy--unpopularity--all to keep his word. And yet for acts of mere physical courage they give men the Victoria Cross. NUMBER II. THE OPPOSITION To conduct the affairs of a nation requires both a Government and an Opposition. So it is with school politics. The only difference is that the scholastic Opposition is much franker about its true aims. The average schoolboy, contemplating the elaborate arrangements made by those in authority for protecting him from himself--rules, roll-calls, bounds, lock-ups, magisterial discipline and prefectorial supervision--decides that the ordering and management of the school can be maintained without any active assistance from him; and he plunges joyously into Opposition with all the abandon of a good sportsman who knows that the odds are heavily against him. He breaks the Law, or is broken by the Law, with equal cheerfulness. [Illustration: THE INTELLECTUAL] The most powerful member of the Opposition is the big boy who has not been made a prefect, and is not likely to be made a prefect. He enjoys many privileges--some of them quite unauthorised--and has no responsibilities. He is one of the happiest people in the world. He has reached the age and status at which corporal punishment is supposed to be too degrading to be feasible: this immunity causes him to realise that he is a personage of some importance; and when he is addressed rudely by junior form-masters he frequently stands upon his dignity and speaks to his Housemaster about it. His position in the House depends firstly upon his athletic ability, and secondly upon the calibre of the prefects. Given a timid set of prefects, and an unquestioned reputation in the football world, Master Bullock has an extremely pleasant time of it. He possesses no fags, but that does not worry him. I once knew a potentate of this breed who improvised a small gong out of the lid of a biscuit-tin, which he hung in his study. When he beat upon this with a tea-spoon, all within earshot were expected to (and did) come running for orders. Such as refrained were chastised with a toasting-fork. Then comes a great company of which the House recks nothing, and of whom House history has little to tell--the Cave-Dwellers, the Swots, the Smugs, the Saps. These keep within their own lurking-places, sedulously avoiding the noisy conclaves which crowd sociably round the Hall fire. For one thing, the conversation there bores them intensely, and for another they would seldom be permitted to join in it. The _rôle_ of Sir Oracle is strictly confined to the athletes of the House, though the Wag and the Oldest Inhabitant are usually permitted to offer observations or swell the chorus. But the Cave-Dwellers, never.