ries, "that your brother threatened to resign the
captaincy if he did not keep quiet?"

"Yes. By Jove, my brother let him have it. That's what 'the Bull' wants;
he wants a fellow who's not afraid of him to stand up against him.
Fernhurst has been run by him long enough. He is a splendid fellow; and
when he's sane I almost love him. But he has become an absolute tyrant.
Thank God, he can't ride roughshod over my brother."

Mansell here broke in. Mansell was rather fond of summing up.

"It's like this. 'The Bull's' a gorgeous fellow, he loves Fernhurst, he
wants to love everyone in it. But he does not understand our House. We
are not going to sweat ourselves to win some rotten Gym Cup or House
Fives; we haven't time for that. We are amateurs. We play the hardest
footer and the keenest cricket of all the houses, and that's where we
stop. He wants us to train every minute, go for runs in the afternoon,
do physical exercises before breakfast so as to become strong,
clean-living Englishmen, who love their bodies and have some respect for
their mind." (A roar of laughter. It was as though 'the Bull' were
speaking.) "Well, I don't care a damn myself for my body or mind. All I
know is that the House is going to get the Two Cock somehow, and that
for six weeks we'll train like Hades, and then, when we've got the cup,
we'll have a blind. We aren't pros who train the whole year round; we're
amateurs!"

And Mansell was perhaps not far wrong.

"I say, you know," says Hunter, who had a cheerful way of suddenly
flying off at a tangent, "talking of 'the Bull,' have you heard of the
row in his house?"

Intense enthusiasm. Buller's was supposed to be "above suspicion."

"Oh, well, old Bull came round the dormitories last night and heard
Peters and Fischer and some other lads talking the most arrant filth. He
gave them all six in pyjamas on the spot, and Fischer is not going to be
allowed to be house captain next year. Rather a jest, you know. Old Bull
thought because his house was always in wonderful training that the
spirit of innocence ruled over the place."

"Well, he must be an ass then," said Mansell. "Why, look at Richmore,
and Parry; and even old Johnson has little respect for a bourgeois
morality."

Mansell was rather pleased with the last phrase; he was not quite
certain what it meant. G.K. Chesterton used it somewhere, probably in
his apology for George IV. It sounded rather nice.

"Well, it's obvious that a blood mu