Michaelmas term, the old game, and nothing but the old game, should be
played, and woe betide any unauthorized "cutters" thereof. This was almost
the only rule that Corker never swerved a hair's breadth from, and bitter
were the regrets when Shannon had sent word to Bourne, our captain, that
he could bring down a really clinking team to put our eleven through their
paces, if the match were played on Thursday. Saturday, on account of big
club fixtures, was almost impossible. Corker consented to the eleven
playing the upstart code for this occasion only, but for the school
generally the old game was to be _de rigueur_.

So on this Thursday pretty well the whole school was out in the Acres,
where the old game was in full swing; and, though I fancy the players to a
man would have liked to have lined up on the touch-line in the next field
and given Shannon the "whisper" he deserves, O.G. claimed them that
afternoon for its own, and they were unwilling martyrs to old Corker's
cast-iron conservatism. Consequently, when Bourne spun the coin and
Shannon decided to play with the wind, there would not be more than
seventy or eighty on the touch-line. Shannon asked me to referee, so I
found a whistle, and the game started.

It was a game in which there seemed to be two or three players who served
as motive forces, and the rest were worked through. On one side Shannon at
back, Amber the International at half, and Aspinall, the International
left-winger, were head and shoulders above the others; on our side, Bourne
and Acton dwarfed the rest.

Bourne played back, and Acton was his partner. Bourne I knew well, since
he was in the Sixth, and I liked him immensely; but of Acton I knew only a
little by repute and nothing personally. He was in the Fifth, but, except
in the ordinary way of school life, he did not come much into the circle