"Take it easy, you have it!"

"Shut up! he's after the record."

* * * * *

The shrill screaming of the girls who had come over, in a white,
linen-starched wagon load, from Fairfield, gave me my last spurt.
Expecting every moment to hear my antagonist grind past me, on the
cinders, I sped up the home-stretch.

The air was swimming in a gold mist. I felt arms under mine, and I was
carried off to the senior tent, by my class-mates....

Yet I am convinced that I would have been beaten, if my rival had not
had the string that held his trunks up, break. He had sunk down on the
track, when they had fallen, not to show his nakedness ... and, pulling
them up, and holding them, amid great laughter, he had still won second
ribbon.

* * * * *

I won the second race--the half-mile, without the humour of such a
fateful intervention. It was my winning of the first that won me the
second. I had just equalled the two-mile record, in the first....

I ran that half, blindly, like a mad man. I was drunk with joy over my
popularity ... for when I had gone into the big dining room for lunch,
all the boys had shouted and cheered and roared, and pounded the dishes