dy-balls, which he deftly smuggled into my hand as he trotted past.

It was now easy to "square" the Misses Redwood, who for a blessed half-
hour cried truce. It was in vain that I suggested that they had better
not plaster their faces and frocks more than could be helped with the
sticky substance of their succulent pabulum. They contemptuously
ignored my right to make any suggestion of the kind, and I finally
abandoned them to their fate.

The first few events were trial heats, in which we as a body were not
specially interested; but when the bell rang up for the Hundred Yards
under fifteen, the Sports had begun for us in earnest.

Leaving the two Daughters of Eve with the bag of brandy-balls between
them, I clambered out of my place to perform the last rites for
Warminster, who was to carry the colours of Sharpe's against Dicky Brown
of the day boys, Muskett of Selkirk's, and another outsider.

It went a little to my heart to be rubbing down somebody else's calves
but Dicky's on an occasion like this. But such is life. Patriotism
goes before friendship, and times do come when one must wish confusion
to one's dearest brother.

So I rubbed down one of Warminster's calves while Trimble rubbed the
other, and Langrish gave him a word of advice about his start, and
Coxhead arranged to call on him for his spurt twenty yards from the
finish. With the exception of the other evening when he arrived at my
mother's party I had never seen Warminster so meek and nervous. He
behaved exactly as if we were taking a last farewell, and would, I
think, have embraced us had we encouraged him to do so.

"Now then," said Langrish, "give us your blazer. Bend well over your
toes for the start, and do it all in a breath."

"Run straight on your track, and don't try to take the other chaps'
water," said Trimble.

"Don't look round at me when I yell, but bucket all you can," said
Coxhead.

"Don't pull up till after the pistol has gone," said I. Then we left
him to his work.

And well enough he did it. He and Dicky went off at the start as if
they'd been shot out of a double-barrelled gun, Dicky with his head
down, our man with his head up. That was what saved him; half-way over
Dicky had to get his chin up, and it lost him a sixteenth of a second,
and that meant six inches. Selkirk's man made an ugly rush thirty yards
from home, but he began it too soon. Warminster wisely waited till he
heard Coxhead's shrill "Gee-up" in