ibilities, and it was
arranged that he should attend her poetry circle which met after
prayers on Saturday evenings. It was composed mainly of older boys,
and two of them were vast intellectuals in the Upper Sixth, so that
Martin felt very awed at the prospect of reading Keats amid such
company. One of them was actually the school poet and had lately
worked off in _The Elfreyan_ the emotions evoked by a summer holiday in
the Lakes:

"The flaming bracken fires the breast
Of bosky Borrowdale,
Down swoops the sun in a riot of red
Behind Scawfell to a watery bed,
And the moon hath clomb o'er Skiddaw's head,
So perfect and so pale."

Martin, who had also been in the Lakes, thought this rather good and
much better than Wordsworth. He was still a Tennysonian and connected
poetry with the lavish use of alliteration and words like 'clomb' and
'bosky.' The thought that on the next Saturday evening he was to read
in the company of such an one was as terrifying as it was inspiring.
But it was not yet to be.

Leopard's one fault was, in Martin's opinion, his tendency to sulk: his
career had been so uniformly successful that he was easily piqued by a
reverse. Once or twice before Martin had thought it expedient to slip
away quietly when he saw Spots looking black, but on this particular
Saturday Fate fought against him. Leopard was dropped from the school
fifteen for the match against Oxford A. It was admitted that once
Leopard had the ball in his hands no one on earth could catch him, but
it was rumoured that his defence was weak: it was always the way with
these running-track sprinters; they couldn't tackle. So the captain
had taken notice of a mere child of sixteen, called Raikes, who played
"back" for his house and could tumble anybody over.

Oxford brought down a strong team, but they only won by sixteen points
to eleven: and Raikes not only scored two excellent tries, but marked
with unerring certainty the notable Rhodes scholar who had made history
in South African Rugby. It was on the lips of all that Spots was in
the soup or the apple-cart (the popularity of the rival metaphors was
evenly balanced), and sporting members of Raikes' house were laying ten
to one that their hero would be 'capped' within a month. Spots had
watched the match dismally from the touch-line and he did not take it
at all well. When he came back to Berney's his angry soul cried out
for tea: and he found that a