THE FIFTEENTH PLACE

“Outside!”

“Don’t be an idiot, man. I bagged it first.”

“My dear chap, I’ve been waiting here a month.”

“When you fellows havequite finished rotting about in front of that bath don’t letme detain you.”

“Anybody seen that sponge?”

“Well, look here”—this in a tone of compromise—“let’s toss for it.”

“All right. Odd man out.”

All of which, being interpreted, meant that the first match of the Easter term had just come to an end, and that those of the team who, being day boys, changed over at the pavilion, instead of performing the operation at leisure and in comfort, as did the members of houses, were discussing the vital question—who was to have first bath?

The Field Sports Committee at Wrykyn—that is, at the school which stood some half-mile outside that town and took its name from it—were not lavish in their expenditure as regarded the changing accommodation in the pavilion. Letters appeared in every second number of theWrykinian, some short, others long, some from members of the school, others from Old Boys, all protesting against the condition of the first, second, and third fifteen dressing-rooms. “Indignant” would inquire acidly, in half a page of small type, if the editor happened to be aware that there was no hair-brush in the second room, and only half a comb. “Disgusted O. W.” would remark that when he came down with the Wandering Zephyrs to play against the third fifteen, the water supply had suddenly and mysteriously failed, and the W.Z.’s had been obliged to go home as they were, in a state of primeval grime, and he thought that this was “a very bad thing in a school of over six hundred boys”, though what the number of boys had to do with the fact that there was no water he omitted to explain. The editor would express his regret in brackets, and things would go on as before.

There was only one bath in the first fifteen room, and there were on the present occ