e he was sure, in his excitement, to
knock down his own wicket with a flourish of his bat.

In football it's no exaggeration to say he was more often on the ground
than the ball itself, and was invariably of more service to the other
side than to his own. In fact, the possession of him got to be quite a
joke.

"Who's going to win?" asks some one, before a match begins.

"Which side is Billy Bungle on?" is the counter question.

"Oh, he's on our side."

"Then of course the other fellows will win," is the uncomplimentary
conclusion; and Billy, poor boy, who overhears it, half chokes with
wounded feelings, and tucks up his sleeves and goes into the game,
determined for once he will disappoint those who mock at him. Alas I
scarcely has the ball been kicked off than he gets in the way of
everybody he ought not to get in the way of, and lets the others pass
him; he collars his own men, and kicks the ball towards his own goal,
and falls down just in time to cause half a dozen of his side to tumble
over him, and just as the ball rises, straight as an arrow, to fly over
the enemy's goal, his unlucky head gets in the way and spoils
everything. No wonder he is in very poor demand as an ally.

Now, the question is, is it altogether Billy's fault he is such a
duffer? Of course it is, say nineteen out of every twenty of my
readers. Any one with an ounce of brains and common sense could avoid
such stupid blunders. But the twentieth is not quite so positive.
"Perhaps it's not altogether Billy's fault," he says. And I must
confess I am inclined to agree with this. Of course, a great deal of
his "duffingness" (I believe that's the proper word) is due to his
carelessness. If he took the trouble to think about what he was doing,
he would never translate a French exercise into Latin, or learn his
arithmetic by heart instead of his history; he would never mix together
(under his nose) two chemicals that would assuredly explode and nearly
blow his head off. For he has a few brains in that head, which makes
such blunders all the less excusable. But I am not sure if a good deal
of his bad luck is not due to the merciless way in which he was laughed
at, and called "duffer," and taught to believe that he could no more do
a thing right than a bull could walk through a china-shop without making
a smash. He got it into his head he was a duffer, and therefore did not
take the pains he might have done.

"What's the use of my bother