and he had got to read; besides, I have
never been able to see that perpetual gloom is of any use to anybody.

I went back to St. Cuthbert's full of desperate resolutions. I wanted
to make every one in the college understand that it was the slackest
place in Oxford, and having done that I wished to find the men who
would make it keener. The scheme was a gigantic one for me to take up;
it needed tact, and I went at it so vigorously that in a few days I had
offended some men and had succeeded in making others look upon me as a
freak. Dennison told me that I had a bee in my bonnet. If he had said
that I was mad I should not have minded, but those horrid little
expressions of his always tried me very much, and I am bound to confess
that my first efforts to rouse the college met with more ridicule than
success. Very few men seemed to care what happened to us, and nearly
everybody pretended that our eight would rise again, and our footer
teams cease to be laughed at, though no one tried to make them any
better. Dennison wrote a skit called "The Decline and Fall of St.
Cuthbert's"; and some artist, who thought that my nose was as big as my
arm, made a drawing of me in which I was trying to carry the college on
my back, and was so overburdened by the weight of it that nothing but
my nose prevented me from being crushed to the ground. It was very
funny and also very unfair in more ways than one, because I did not
start my crusade with any idea of becoming important, and I have no
feature which is superlatively large.

This skit of Dennison's really settled me for a time, but I did stir up
one or two men whom I had never expected to do anything. Jack Ward
stopped driving about with Bunny Langham, and began to play footer, and
Collier actually went down to the river every afternoon. Physical
incapability prevented him from rowing well, but he persuaded several
other men, who did not suffer as he did, to go through the same
drudgery, and for self-sacrifice I thought he was hard to beat, because
he was quite a comical sight in a boat. What good did come from my
first crusade was due chiefly to him; a kind of revivalist spirit was
upon him, and many unsuspecting freshers who had only thought of the
river as a place to avoid, were unable to resist his entreaties.

The dons heard of my crusade, and I know that Mr. Edwardes did not like
it, but I had two of them on my side, and the others did not take any
active measures aga