The ball is returned, and they meet it
and drive it back amongst the masses of the School already in motion.
Then the two sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a
swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where
the ball is, and there are the keen players to be met, and the glory and
the hard knocks to be got. You hear the dull thud, thud of the ball, and
the shouts of "Off your side," "Down with him," "Put him over," "Bravo."
This is what we call "a scrummage," gentlemen, and the first scrummage
in a School-house match was no joke in the consulship of Plancus.
But see! it has broken; the ball is driven out on the School-house side,
and a rush of the School carries it past the School-house players-up.
"Look out in quarters," Brooke's and twenty other voices ring out. No
need to call, though: the School-house captain of quarters has caught it
on the bound, dodges the foremost School boys, who are heading the rush,
and sends it back with a good drop-kick well into the enemy's country.
And then follows rush upon rush, and scrummage upon scrummage, the ball
now driven through into the School-house quarters, and now into the
School goal; for the School-house have not lost the advantage which the
kick-off and a slight wind gave them at the outset, and are slightly
"penning" their adversaries. You say you don't see much in it
all--nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball which
seems to excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a bull.
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