full-back in that match when
they beat us at Haileybury by 32 to 12 in Evans's year. You may
recollect Saillard getting laid out in the second half,
Haileybury continuing without a full-back--with very sound
judgment as it turned out, for this enabled them to play us off
our legs in the scrum and control the game with eight forwards to
seven, and we never got the ball to give to our eight outsides.
To sum up, I am in most congenial society and enjoying life
hugely.

Naturally, I am working pretty hard, learning my new job. I am
determined to make good at it, and I have the conviction that,
with hard work and concentration, a man with education behind him
can succeed in pretty well anything that he likes. Leave may come
in the near future, provided the authorities consider I have made
sufficient progress in my new studies; but I have a lot to learn,
and it is not my desire to go on leave before I have mastered at
least the elements of my new job--very much the reverse, in fact.

_February 20th, 1917._

Am having a grand time--up to my eyes in oil, grease and mud from
8 A.M. to 5 P.M. I am finding my old hobby of engineering of the
greatest value, and my enthusiasm for seeing "the wheels go
round" has returned in all its old force. Even the gas-engine and
dynamo of famous (or infamous) memory are proving most
serviceable to me through the experience I acquired with
them--demonstrating again how useful the most _recherche_ of
ideas, occupations or hobbies may become. No knowledge is to be
despised.

The only fly in the ointment is that an exam. is due for me in a
week's time or so--as you know, impending exams. fill me with
terror. I have such an accursedly active imagination that I find
it impossible to banish from my head the thought, "What if I
fail?" I've always been afflicted with this, though I am bound to
say that when it came to the point it did not, as far as might be
judged by results, affect my actual performances. But I am,
nevertheless, in a chronic state of what the B.E.F. calls "wind
up" on account of this exam. I am so eager to do well that the
mere thought of failing is abhorrent. I am inclined to ascribe
these feelings at bottom to egotism.

There is quite a number of South