Hence the advertisement of the meeting in the Town Hall caused joy and hope, and people said to themselves:  “Something’s bound to be done; the old club can’t go out like that.”  And everybody grew quite sentimental.  And although nothing is supposed to be capable of filling Bursley Town Hall except a political meeting and an old folk’s treat, Bursley Town Hall was as near full as made no matter for the football question.  Many men had cheerfully sacrificed a game of billiards and a glass of beer in order to attend it.

The Mayor, in the chair, was a mild old gentleman who knew nothing whatever about football and had probably never seen a football match; but it was essential that the meeting should have august patronage and so the Mayor had been trapped and tamed.  On the mere fact that he paid an annual subscription to the golf club, certain parties built up the legend that he was a true sportsman, with the true interests of sport in his soul.

He uttered a few phrases, such as “the manly game,” “old associations,” “bound up with the history of England,” “splendid fellows,” “indomitable pluck,” “dogged by misfortune” (indeed, he produced quite an impression on the rude and grim audience), and then he called upon Councillor Barlow to make a statement.

Councillor Barlow, on the Mayor’s right, was a different kind of man from the Mayor.  He was fifty and iron-grey, with whiskers, but no moustache; short, stoutish, raspish.

He said nothing about manliness, pluck, history, or Auld Lang Syne.

He said he had given his services as Chairman to the football club for thirteen years; that he had taken up L2000 worth of shares in the Company; and that as at that moment the Company’s liabilities would exactly absorb its assets, his L2000 was worth exactly nothing.  “You may say,” he said, “I’ve lost that L2000 in thirteen years.  That is, it’s the same as if I’d been steadily paying three pun’ a week out of my own pocket to provide football matches that you chaps wouldn’t take the trouble to go and see.  That’s the straight of it!  What have I got for my pains?  Nothing but worries and these!” (He pointed to his grey hairs.) “And I’m not alone; there’s others; and now I have to come and defend myself at a public meeting.  I’m supposed not to have the best interests of football at heart.  Me and my co-Directors,” he proceeded, with even a rougher raspishness, “have warned the town again and again what would happen if the matches weren’t better patronised.  And now it’s happened, and now it’s too late, you want to do something!  You can’t!  It’s too late.  There’s only one thing the matter with first-class football in Bursley,” he concluded, “and it isn’t the players.  It’s the public—­it’s yourselves.  You’re the most craven lot of tom-fools that ever a big football club had to do with.  When we lose a match, what do you do?  Do you come and encourage us next time?  No, you stop away, and leave us fifty or sixty pound out of pocket on