anchions, the coarse canvas of the
mattresses, the disciplined lines, the tramping feet, the commanding
voices of the instructors, gave a confused and dreamlike suggestion of
the lower deck of a man-of-war. To-night, under the west end of the
gallery, a small platform was raised for the Mayor of Marylebone and a
score of guests. The galleries themselves were packed with members of
the Polytechnic and their friends.

The programme of the Grand Display announced as its first item:

PARALLEL BARS
_Tableau by_
MESSRS. BOOTY, TYSER, BUIST, WAUCHOPE, AND
J. R. F. RANSOME

There was a murmur of surreptitious, half-ironic applause. "Stick it,
Ransome; stick it, old boy!"

The reference was to his extraordinary attitude.

J. R. F. Ransome appeared as the apex and the crown of a rude triangular
structure whose base was formed by the high parallel bars, flanked at
each end by two bodies (Booty and Tyser front), two supple adolescent
bodies, bent backward like two bows. He stood head downward on his hands
that grasped and were supported by the locked arms of two solid
athletes, Buist and Wauchope, themselves mounted gloriously and
perilously on the straining bars.

Considered as to his arms, and the white "zephyr" and flannels that he
wore, he was merely a marvelous young man balancing himself with
difficulty in an unnatural posture. But his body, uptilted, poised as by
a miracle in air, with the slender curve of its back, its flattened
hips, its feet laid together like wings folded in the first downrush,
might have been the body of a young immortal descending with facile
precipitancy to earth.

He maintained for a sensible moment his appearance of having just flown
from the roof of the Gymnasium. Far below, the photographer fumbled
leisurely with his apparatus.

"Hurry up, there!" "Stick it, Ransome!" "Half a mo!" "Stick it, Ranny;
stick it!" they whispered. "Steady does it."

And Ranny stuck it. Ranny actually, from his awful eminence, sang out,
"No fear!"

The flashlight immortalized his moment.

That was his way--to stick it; to see it out; to go through with the
adventure alert and gay, wearing that fine smile of his, so
extravagantly uplifted at the corners. "Stick it!" was the motto of his
individual recklessness and of the dogged, enduring conservatism of his
class. It kept him in a mahogany pen, at a mahogany desk, for forty-four
hours