It’s a way we have in the Navy,
It’s a way we have in the Public Schools,
Which nobody can deny!
Then the boys would flock to the dormitory windows, and wave towels and join in the “Hip-hip-hip-hurrah!” of the chorus, and the winning team would swagger through the dormitories and show the beautiful blue marks on their shins, and the little boys would be allowed to get sponges and hot water.
Very few things that the world can offer make up for having missed a place in the First Fifteen, with its black jersey and white—snow-white—knickerbockers, and the velvet skull-cap with the gold tassel—the cap that you leave out in the rain and accidentally step upon to make it look as old as if you had been in the First Fifteen for years.
The other outward sign of the First Fifteen that the happy boy generally wore through a hard season was the “jersey-mark”—a raw, red scrape on ear and jawbone where the skin had been fretted by the rough jerseys in either side in the steady drive of many scrimmages. We were trained to put our heads down, pack in the shape of a wedge and shove, and it was in that shape that the First Fifteen stood up to a team of trained men for two and twenty counted minutes. We got the ball through in the end.
At the close of the winter term, when there were no more foot-ball teams to squander and the Christmas holidays were coming, the School set itself to the regular yearly theatricals—a farce and a three-act play all complete. Sometimes it was “The Rivals,” or sometimes an attempt at a Shakespearean play; but the farces were the most popular.
All ended with the School-Saga, the “Vive la Compagnie!” in which the Senior boy of the School chanted the story of the School for the past twelve months. It was very long and very difficult to make up, though all the poets of all the forms had been at work on it for weeks; and the School gave the chorus at the top of its voice.
On the last Sunday of the term the last hymn in chapel was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” We did not know what it meant then, and we did not care, but we stood up and sang it till the music was swamped in the rush. The big verse, like the “tug-of-war” verse in Mrs. Ewing’s “Story of a Short Life,” was:
We are not divided,