to make too little of its ambitious projects.

Arthur, Dig, and their _coterie_--most of them safely housed already in
the second eleven--caught a regular cricket fever. They lived in an
atmosphere of cricket. They thought in cricket, and dreamed of nothing
else. Any question which arose resolved itself into a cricket match in
their minds, and was mentally played out to bring it to a decision.
Their ordinary talk betrayed their mania, and even their work was
solaced by the importation of cricket into its deepest problems.

Here, for instance, is an illustration of the kind of talk which might
been have overheard one evening during the first part of the term in the
study over Railsford's head.

Arthur was groaning over his Euclid.

"I'm clean bowled by this blessed proposition," said he. "Here have I
been slogging away at it all the evening and never got my bat properly
under it yet. You might give us a leg-up, Dig."

"Bless you," said Dig, "I'm no good at that sort of yorker. I'm bad
enough stumped as it is by this Horace. He gets an awful screw on now
and then, and just when you think you've scored off him, there you are
in among the slips, caught out low down. I vote we go and ask Marky."

"Don't like it," said Arthur. "Marky served us scurvily over poor old
Smiley, and I don't mean to go over his popping-crease, if I can help
it, any more."

"That was an underhand twist altogether," said Dig. "Bad enough for
Ainger to bowl us out, without him giving it out, too, the way he did.
You know, I really think we ought to tell him what a nice way we can
stump him out if we like. He just thinks we've caved in and put off our
pads."

"I don't like it, Dig. It would be an awfully bad swipe, and Daisy
would be knocked over as much as he would. We're not forced to play up
to him any more; but I don't like running him out."

"You're a jolly decent brother-in-law, you are," said Dig admiringly,
"and it's a pity Marky don't know what he owes you."

At this point Tilbury burst into the room. If Dig and Arthur were a
little crazed about cricket, Tilbury was positively off his head.

"How's that, umpires?" cried he, as he entered. "Did you see me playing
this afternoon? Went in second man, with Wake and Sherriff bowling, my
boys. I knocked up thirty-two off my own bat, and would have been not
out, only Mills saw where I placed my smacks in between the two legs,
and slipped up and got hold of me low down wi