s have nothing to do with it. If the best
fifteen names were all on your side, I should have to select them. But
they are not. The fifteen I have chosen are undoubtedly the best men we
have, and the team most likely to win the match. I suppose that is what
we play for.

"Yours truly,--

"Cecil Yorke."

This polite correspondence Clapperton laid before his friends. The
general feeling was that the Moderns were being unfairly and
disrespectfully used.

"It's the old story over again," said Dangle. "If we don't look after
ourselves, nobody else will."

"At any rate, as long as he's captain, I suppose he has the right to
pick the team," said Fullerton. "_I_ shouldn't be particularly sorry if
he were to leave me out. It wouldn't matter to me."

"Who cares whether it matters to you? It matters to our side," said
Brinkman, "and we oughtn't to stand it."

CHAPTER SIX.

ROLLITT.

Rollitt of Wakefield's was a standing mystery at Fellsgarth. Though he
had been three years at the school, and worked his way up from the
junior form to one of the first six, no one knew him. He had no
friends, and did not want any. He rarely spoke when not obliged to do
so; and when he did, he said either what was unexpected or disagreeable.
He scarcely ever played in the matches, but when he did he played
tremendously. Although a Classic, he was addicted to scientific
research and long country walks. His study was a spectacle for
untidiness and grime. He abjured his privilege of having a fag. No one
dared to take liberties with him, for he had an arm like an oak branch,
and a back as broad as the door.

All sorts of queer stories were afloat about him. It was generally
whispered that his father was a common workman, and that the son was
being kept at school by charity. Any reference to his poverty was the
one way of exciting Rollitt. But it was too risky an amusement to be
popular.

His absence of mind, however, was his great enemy at school. Of him the
story was current that once in the Fourth, when summoned to the front to
call-over the register, he called his own name among the rest, and
receiving no reply, looked to his place, and seeing the desk vacant,
marked Rollitt down as absent. Another time, having gone to his room
after morning school to change into his flannels for cricket, he had
gone to bed by mistake, and slept soundly till call-bell next morning.
"Have you heard Rollitt's last?" came to be the