We arrived on the ground, creating less sensation than I would have liked.  Radley took a deck-chair in front of the pavilion next to Dr. Chapman, or “Chappy,” surely the stoutest and jolliest of school doctors.  The fact that Chappy, occupying so withdrawn a position as medical officer to the two schools, should have been such a memorable figure in the life of the boys testifies to the largeness of his personality.  And, not being the most modest of stout and hearty doctors, he was always willing himself to testify to the largeness of his personality.  He dearly loved cricket, he would tell you, for he had been a cricketer himself and seen many worse; and he dearly loved boys, for he had been a boy himself and never seen any worse:  so, where there was a boys’ cricket match, there, old man, you would find Dr. Chapman.  Besides, when boys played cricket, it was well to have a doctor on the field, and he was a doctor and had never met a better.  Would you have a cigar?  All tobacco, in his opinion, led to the overthrow of body and soul—­believe him; it did—­but you would never see him without a cigar.  Not he!

Such was Chappy, the medicine man.  He was right, about the cigar.  As I figure him in my mind, the things that I immediately associate with his stout, jolly presence are a chewed cigar drooping from his mouth and a huge white waistcoat soiled by the tumbled ash.  I sum him up as a genial soul whose religion was to seek comfort, to find popularity a comfortable thing, and to love popularity among young things as the most comfortable of all.  And, if that last dogma of his be not Heaven’s truth, then my outlook on life is all wrong, and this book’s a failure!

As Radley placed his muscular frame in the deck-chair, Chappy greeted him with these regrettable remarks:  “Hallo, Radley, aren’t you dead yet?  How the devil are you?  My word, how you’ve grown!”

The match started, Doe and our captain opening the Kensingtowe innings.  I left the other boys and lay down upon the grass a little behind Radley’s chair.  Converging reasons led me there:  one—­I desired that my old friends, the Suckers, should know of my intimacy with S.T.  Radley, of Middlesex; two—­I felt Chappy’s conversation would certainly be entertaining; and three—­I should soon have to go in to bat, and was feeling too nervous to talk to offensively happy boys who were unworried by such imminent publicity.

“So they’ve sent us a cricketer in young Doe,” Radley was saying to Dr. Chapman.

Chappy turned in his chair, which creaked alarmingly, and composed himself to talk comfortably.

“Oh, the Gray Doe—­yes, charming little squirt—­best bat the Nursery had last year.  And, though nobody but myself recognised it, the Gem was the best bowler.”

“The Gem?” queried Radley.  “Who was the ’Gem’?”

“Don’t you know the Gem?  Why, Ray, the little snipe with eyes something between a diamond and a turquoise.  The ladies here called him ‘The Gem’ because of this affliction.  He’d be a great bowler, only he’s too shy.”