"Our genial host," said Clowes, sawing at the cake, "appears to have that tired feeling. He seems to have lost that _joie de vivre_ of his, what?" "It must be pretty sickening," said Trevor sympathetically. "I'm glad I wasn't captain in a bad year." "The rummy thing is that the worse they are, the more side they stick on. You see chaps who wouldn't have been in the third in a good year walking about in first fifteen blazers, and first fifteen scarves, and first fifteen stockings, and sweaters with first fifteen colours round the edges. I wonder they don't tattoo their faces with first fifteen colours." "It would improve some of them," said Clowes. Allardyce resumed his melancholy remarks. "But, as I was saying, it's not only that the footer's rotten. That you can't help, I suppose. It's the general beastliness of things that I bar. Rows with the town, for instance. We've been having them on and off ever since you left. And it'll be worse now, because there's an election coming off soon. Are you fellows stopping for the night in the town? If so, I should advise you to look out for yourselves." "Thanks," said Clowes. "I shouldn't like to see Trevor sand-bagged. Nor indeed, should I--for choice--care to be sand-bagged myself. But, as it happens, the good Donaldson is putting us up, so we escape the perils of the town. "Everybody seems so beastly slack now," continued Allardyce. "It's considered the thing. You're looked on as an awful blood if you say you haven't done a stroke of work for a week. I shouldn't mind that so much if they were some good at anything. But they can't do a thing. The footer's rotten, the gymnasium six is made up of kids an inch high--we shall probably be about ninetieth at the Public Schools' Competition--and there isn't any one who can play racquets for nuts. The only thing that Wrykyn'll do this year is to get the Light-Weights at Aldershot. Drummond ought to manage that. He won the Feathers last time. He's nearly a stone heavier now, and awfully good. But he's the only man we shall send up, I expect. Now that O'Hara and Moriarty are both gone, he's the only chap we have who's up to Aldershot form. And nobody else'll take the trouble to practice. They're all too slack." "In fact," said Clowes, getting up, "as was only to be expected, the school started going to the dogs directly I left. We shall have to be pushing on now, Allardyce. We promised to look in on Seymour before we went to bed. Friend let us away." "Good night," said Allardyce. "What you want," said Clowes solemnly, "is a liver pill. You are looking on life too gloomily. Take a pill. Let there be no stint. Take two. Then we shall hear your merry laugh ringing through the old cloisters once more. Buck up and be a bright and happy lad, Allardyce." "Take more than a pill to make me that," growled that soured footballer. Mr Seymour's views on the school resembled those of Allardyce. Wrykyn, in his opinion, was suffering from a reaction.