Insensibly I had
shifted my burden to the broad shoulders of this splendid friend,
and my thoughts wandered with my eyes as the minutes passed. The
room was the good-sized, square one, with the folding doors, the
marble mantel-piece, and the gloomy, old-fashioned distinction
peculiar to the Albany. It was charmingly furnished and
arranged, with the right amount of negligence and the right
amount of taste. What struck me most, however, was the absence
of the usual insignia of a cricketer's den. Instead of the
conventional rack of war-worn bats, a carved oak bookcase, with
every shelf in a litter, filled the better part of one wall; and
where I looked for cricketing groups, I found reproductions of
such works as "Love and Death" and "The Blessed Damozel," in
dusty frames and different parallels. The man might have been a
minor poet instead of an athlete of the first water. But there
had always been a fine streak of aestheticism in his
complex composition; some of these very pictures I had myself
dusted in his study at school; and they set me thinking of yet
another of his many sides--and of the little incident to which he
had just referred.
Everybody knows how largely the tone of a public school depends
on that of the eleven, and on the character of the captain of
cricket in particular; and I have never heard it denied that in
A.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28