times out of ten.

Break was a more uncertain quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the
expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could
get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on anything
but a plumb wicket.

Running he had acquired in a similar manner. He had nothing approaching
style, but he had twice won the mile and half mile at the Sports off
elegant runners, who knew all about stride and the correct timing of the
sprints and all the rest of it.

Briefly, he was a worker. He had heart.

A boy of Adair's type is always a force in a school. In a big public
school or six or seven hundred, his influence is felt less; but in a
small school like Sedleigh he is like a tidal wave, sweeping all before
him. There were two hundred boys at Sedleigh, and there was not one of
them in all probability who had not, directly or indirectly, been
influenced by Adair. As a small boy his sphere was not large, but the
effects of his work began to be apparent even then. It is human nature
to want to get something which somebody else obviously values very much;
and when it was observed by members of his form that Adair was going to
great trouble and inconvenience to secure a place in the form eleven or
fifteen, they naturally began to think, too, that it was worth being in
those teams. The consequence was that his form always played hard. This
made other forms play hard. And the net result was that, when Adair
succeeded to the captaincy of Rugger and cricket in the same year,
Sedleigh, as Mr. Downing, Adair's housemaster and the nearest approach
to a cricket master that Sedleigh possessed, had a fondness for saying,