MAJOR putnam stone is dead, but his soul goes marching on. Mainly it does its marching on at Midsylvania University. Every fall, down yonder, on the night of the day of the last game of the season, when the squad has broken training and many of the statutes touching on the peace and quiet of the community, there is a dinner. At the end of this dinner the captain of the team stands up at one end of the table and chants out: “Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom!”—just like that. Whereupon there are loud cheers. And then, at the far end of the table from him, the chairman of the athletic community stands up in his place and lifts his mug and says, in the midst of a little silence: “To the memory of Major Putnam Stone!” Then everybody rises and drinks; and there are no heel-taps.

This ceremony is never omitted. It is a tradition; and they go in rather strongly for traditions at Midsylvania, and always have since the days when there was not much else to Midsylvania except its traditions. The team may have won that afternoon, or it may have lost. The boys may be jubilating for the biggest victory of the whole year, or, over the trenches and the tankards, consoling themselves and one another for an honourable defeat at the hands of their classic rival, Vanderbeck. It makes no difference. Win or lose, they toast the shade and the name of Major Stone.

So there is no danger that the Major will be forgotten at the University, any more than there is danger of such a thing coming to pass in the Evening Press shop where the Major used to work. Most of the old hands who worked there with him once upon a time are gone elsewhere now. One or two or three are dead and the rest of us, with few exceptions, have scattered over the country. But among the men who are our successors on the staff the spirit of the old man walks, and there is a tale of him to be told to each beginner who comes on the paper. It is as much a part of the history of the city room as the great stories that Ike Webb, who was our star man, wrote back in those latter nineties; as much a part as the sayings and the doings of little Pinky Gilfoil, who passed out last year, serving with the American ambulance corps over in France.

The last time I was down that way I stopped over between trains and went around on Jefferson Street to look the old place over. It was late in the afternoon, after press time for the final edition, and the day force had all departed; but out of the press-room to greet me came limping old Henry, the black night watchman, who, according to belief, had been a fixture of the Evening Press since the corner stone of the building was laid.

“Yassuh,” said Henry to me after this and that and the other thing had been discussed back and forth between us; “we still talks a mighty much about ole Majah. Dis yere new issue crop of young w'ite genelmens we got workin' 'round yere now'days gits a chanc't to hear tell about him frequent an' of'en. They's a picture of him hangin' upstairs in de big boss' room on de thud flo'. Big boss, he sets a heap of store by 'at air picture. An' they tells me 'at de mate to it is hangin' up in 'at air new structure w'ich they calls de Forbes Memorial, out at de Univussity.”

If my recollection serves me aright I have once or twice before touched on sundry chapters in the life and works of the old Major, telling how, for him, nothing of real consequence happened in this world between the surrender of Lee at Appomattox and the day, nearly forty years later, when all his tidy property was wiped out in an unfortunate investment, and he moved out of his suite at the old Gault House and abandoned his armchair in a front window at the Shawnee Club, and, at the age of sixty-four and a salary of twelve dollars a week, took a job as cub reporter on the Evening Press; how because he would persist in gnawing at the rinds of old yesterdays instead of nosing into the things of the current day he was a most utter and complete failure at the job; how once through chance, purely, he uncovered the whoppingest scoop that a real reporter could crave for and then chucked it away again to save a woman who by the standards of all proper people wasn't worth saving in the first place; how by compassion of the owner of the paper and against the judgment of everybody else, he hung on all through the summer, a drag upon the organization and a clog on the ankle of City Editor Wilford Devore; how on the opening day of the famous Lyric Hall convention he finally rose to an emergency that was of his liking and with the persuasive aid of a brace of long-barrelled, ivory-handled cavalry revolvers stampeded the Stickney gang, when they tried by force to seize the party machinery, having first put that official bad man and deputy subheader of the opposition, Mink Satterlee, out of business, by love-tapping Mink upon his low and retreating forehead with the butt end of one of his shooting irons; and how then as a reward therefor, he was made war-editor of the sheet, thereafter fitting comfortably and snugly into a congenial berth especially devised and created for his occupancy. All this has elsewhere been told.

This present tale, which has to do in part with the Major and in part with the student body of Midsylvania, dates from sometime after the day when he became our war editor, and was writing those long and tiresome special articles of his, dealing favourably with Jackson's Campaign in the Valley, and unfavourably with Sherman's March to the Sea.

Midsylvania, those days, was a university with a long vista of historic associations behind it and a puny line of endowments to go forward on; so it went forward very slowly indeed. To get the most favourable perspective on Midsylvania you must needs look backward into a distinguished but mouldy past, and consider the list of dead-and-gone warriors and statesmen and educators and clergymen who had been graduated in the class of '49 or the class of '54, or some other class. Chief among its physical glories were a beech tree, under which Daniel Boone was said to have camped overnight once; an ancient chapel building of red brick, with a row of fat composition pillars, like broken legs in plaster casts, stretching across its front to uphold its squatty portico; and in the centre of the campus, a noseless statue of Henry Clay.

Sons of Old Families in the state attended it, principally, I suppose, because their fathers before them had attended it; sons of new families mostly went elsewhere for their education. With justice, you might speak of Midsylvania as being conservative, which was true; but when you said that, you said it all, and it let you out. There was nothing more to be said.

If poor shabby old Midsylvania lagged behind sundry of her sister schools in the matter of equipment, most certainly and most woefully did she lag behind them in the matter of athletics. In that regard, and perhaps other regards, she was an Old Ladies' Home. Eight governors of American commonwealths, six of them dead and two yet living, might be listed on the roster of her alumni—and were; but you sought in vain there for the name of a great pitcher or of a consistent winner of track events, or of a champion pole vaulter. If anybody mentioned Midsylvania in connection with college sports, it was to laugh. So there was a good deal of laughing one fall when, for the first time, she went in for football. The laughter continued, practically without abatement, through that season; but early the following season it died away altogether, to be succeeded by a wave of astonishment and of reluctantly conceded admiration, which ran from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi River. Other football teams began to respect Midsylvania's football team. They had to; she mauled it into their respective consciousness.

The worm had turned—and turned something besides the other cheek, at that; for in that second year she won her first game, which was her game with Exstein Normal. Now Exstein Normal came up proudly, like an army glorious with banners, and went down abruptly, like a scuttled ship: Score, thirty-one to nothing. Following on this, she beat Holy Mount's team of fiery Louisiana Creoles, with a red-headed demon of a New Orleans Irish boy for their captain; and, in succession, she took on and overcame Cherokee Tech., and Alabama State, and Bayless.

She held to a tie what was conceded to be the best team that Old Dominion had ever mustered; and Vanderbeck, the largest and, athletically considered, the strongest of them all, bested her only by the narrowest and closest of margins on Vanderbeck's own gridiron. It was one of the upsetting things that never can happen, but occasionally do, that Midsylvania should go straight through to Thanksgiving Day with a miraculous record of five victories, one tie and one defeat out of seven games played, and with not a man in the regular lineup seriously damaged. And yet not so miraculous either when you came to cast up causes to find results. Her men had steam and had speed and had strategy, which meant team-work; in fact, they had everything. Heaven alone knew where, within the space of one year they had got it, but they had it: that was the main point, the incontrovertible detail.

You know the old saying: Home folks are always the last ones to appreciate us. More or less I think this must have been true of us as regards our own University's football outfit. Undoubtedly a lot had been written and said in cities farther south about it, before the Evening Press and the other papers in town began fully to realise that Midsylvania was putting the town on the football map. But when we did realise it we gave her and her team front page space and sporting page space, and plenty of both. Before we had been content to bestow upon her a weekly column which one of the undergraduates turned in at space rates, and pretty poor space rates at that—departmental stuff, mostly dealing with faculty changes, and Greek letter society doings and campus gossip and such-like. Now though almost anything that anybody on the staff or off of it chose to grind out about the boys who wore the M on their sweater breasts found a warm welcome after it landed on the City Editor's desk. Local pride in local achievement had been roused and if anybody knows of anything stronger than local pride in a city of approximately a hundred and fifty thousand population, please tell me what it is. We covered the games that were played at home that year as fully as the limitations of a somewhat scanty staff permitted, and Ike Webb was detailed to travel with the squad when it played away from home. He sent back by telegraph, regardless of expense, stories on the games abroad, which were smeared all over the sheet under spread heads and signed as being “By Our Special Staff Correspondent.” They were good stories—Ike was not addicted to writing bad ones, ever—and they made circulation.

There is no telling how many letters from subscribers came to the chief commending him for his journalistic enterprise. He ran a good many of them. The paper rode with the team on the crest of the popularity wave. Trust Devore for that. He had a sense for news-values which compensated and more than compensated for certain temperamental shortcomings as exhibited inside the plant.

One day in the tail end of November the old Major came stumping down the stairs from his sanctum—anyhow, he always called it his sanctum—upon the top floor in a little partitioned-off space adjoining the chief's office, where he had a desk of his own and where he did his work. He had a wad of copy paper in his hand. In dress and in manner he was the same old Major that he had been in the flush times two years back, when he used to come in daily, ostensibly to get some exchanges but really to sit and sit, and bore everybody who would listen with tiresome long accounts of things that happened between 1861 and 1865—not the shabby forlorn figure he became that first summer after he got his twelve-dollar-a-week job—but his former self, recreated all over again. His fullbreasted shirt of fine linen jutted out above the unbuttoned top of his low waistcoat in pleaty, white billows and his loose black sailor's tie made a big clump at his throat where the ends of his Lord Byron collar came together. His cuffs almost covered his hands and his longish white hair was like silk floss lying on his coat collar behind. That little white goatee of his jutted out under his lower lip like a tab of carded wool. Altogether he was the Major of yore, rejoicing sartorially in his present state of comparative prosperity. The boys around the shop always said that if the Major had only ten dollars and fifty cents in the world he would spend five dollars of it for his club dues and five of it on his wardrobe and give the remaining fifty cents to some beggar. I guess he would have, too.

He came downstairs this day and walked up to Devore, and laid down his sheaf of pages at Devore's elbow. “A special contribution, sir,” he said very ceremoniously.

Devore ran through the first page, which was covered with pencil marks—the Major always wrote his stuff out in long hand—and glanced up, a little bit astonished.

“Kind of out of your usual line, isn't it, Major Stone?” he asked.

“In a measure, sir—yes,” stated the old man; and he rocked on his high heels as though he might be nervous regarding the reception his contribution would have in this quarter. “Under the circumstances I feel justified in a departure from the material I customarily indite. But if you feel—”

“Oh, that's all right!” said Devore, divining what the Major meant to say before the Major finished saying it. “There's always room for good stuff.”

He laid the first sheet aside and shuffled through the sheets under it, picking out lines and appraising the full purport of the manuscript, as any skilled craftsman of a newspaper copy desk can do in half the length of time an outsider would be needing to make out the sense of it.

“About young Morehead, eh? I didn't know you knew him, Major?”

“Personally I do not. But, in his lifetime, I knew his gallant father well; in fact, intimately. For some months we served together on the staff of General Leonidas Polk. Accordingly I felt qualified by my personal acquaintance with his family to treat of the subject as I have treated it.”

“Oh, I see!” Devore gave an involuntary smile quick burial in the palm of his cupped hand. “And so you've caught the fever too?”

“Fever, sir? What fever?”

“I mean you've got yourself all worked up about football, the same as everybody else in town?”

“Not at all, sir. Of the game of football I know little or nothing. In my college days we concerned ourselves in our sportive hours with very different pursuits and recreations.”

The Major, as we knew from hearing him tell about it a hundred times, had left the University of Virginia in his second year to enlist in the army. And we knew his views on the subject of sports. If a young person of the masculine gender could waltz with the ladies, and ride a horse well enough to follow the hounds without falling off at the jumps, and with a shotgun could kill half the birds he fired at—these, from the Major's standpoint, were accomplishments enough for any Southern gentleman, now that the use of duelling pistols had died out. We had heard him say so, often.

“Football, considered as a game, does not interest me,” he went on now. “I have never seen it played. But on account of Mr. James Payne Morehead, Junior, I am interested. Being of the strain of blood that he is, I am constrained to believe he will acquit himself in a manner worthy of his ancestry, wheresoever he may be placed. In the article you have there before you I have said as much.”

“So I notice,” said Devore, keeping most of the irony out of his tone. “Thank you, Major—we'll stick the yarn in to-morrow.” And then, as the old man started out: “By the way, Major Stone, if you've never seen a game you might enjoy seeing the one next Saturday—against Sangamon. It'll be your last chance this season. I'll save you out a press ticket—if you don't mind sitting in the newspaper box with the boys that I'll have out there covering the story?”

“I am obliged to you, sir,” said Major Stone. “I shall be pleased to avail myself of the courtesy, and nothing could afford me more pleasure than to have the company of my youthful compatriots in the field of journalistic endeavour on that occasion.”

He talked like that. Talking, he made you think of the way some people write in their letters, not of the way anybody else on earth spoke in ordinary conversation.

Out he went then, all reared back and Devore read the copy through, chuckling to himself. It wasn't a malicious chuckle, though. Devore was not likely to forget what the Major did for him that day eighteen months before at the Lyric Hall convention when Bad Mink Satterlee tried to cave in Devore's skull with a set of brass knuckles and doubtlessly would have carried the undertaking through successfully if Major Stone hadn't been so swiftly deft with the ivory butt of one of his pair of cavalry pistols, nor to forget how nasty he, as City Editor, had been before that, during all the months of the Major's apprenticeship as a sixty-four-year-old cub reporter.

“Just like the old codger!” he said, tapping the manuscript with his hand affectionately. “Starts out to write about the kid; gives the kid a couple of paragraphs; and then uses up twenty pages more telling what great men the kid's father and grandfather were. Here, you fellows, just listen a minute to this.”

He read a few sentences aloud.

“Get the angle, don't you? Major figures that any spunk and any sense the Morehead boy's got is a heritage from his revered ancestors, and that he'll just naturally have to make good because he had 'em for his ancestors. Well, at that, the Maje is probably right, without realising it. I'm thinking Captain James Payne Morehead, Junior, and his bunch of little fair-haired playmates are going to need something more than they've got now when they go up against that bunch of huskies from Sangamon next Saturday. How about it, eh?” We knew about it, or at least we thought we knew about it, as surely as anyone may know in advance of the accomplished event. There was a note of foreboding in the answers we made to our immediate superior there in the city room. One of the boys summed it up: “'Pride goeth before a fall,'” he said; “and biting off more than you can chaw is bad on the front teeth—provided the Midsylvania eleven have any front teeth left after the Sangamon eleven get through toying with their bright young faces on Saturday afternoon.” Which, differently expressed, perhaps, was the common sentiment. A chill of dread was descending upon the community at large; in fact, had been descending like a dark, dank blanket for upward of a week now. During the first few hours after the announcement came out that the team of Sangamon College, making their post-season tour, would swing downward across Messrs. Mason and Dixon's justly celebrated survey marks for the express purpose of playing against Midsylvania, there had been a flare-up of jubilation that was statewide.

It was no small honour for victorious Midsylvania that her football eleven should be the chosen eleven below the Line to meet these all-conquering gladiators from above it. So everybody agreed, at the outset. But on second thought, which so often is the better thought of the two, the opportunity seemed, after all, not so glorious. A hero may go down leading a forlorn hope—may die holding a last ditch—and posterity possibly will applaud him; but we may safely figure that he does not greatly enjoy himself while thus engaged; nor can his friends and well-wishers, looking on, be so very happy, either, over the dire and distressful outcome of the sacrificial deed. The nearer came the day of the game and the more people read about the strength of the invaders, the more dismal loomed the prospect for the defenders.

To begin with, Sangamon was one of the biggest fresh-water colleges on the continent, and one of the richest. Sangamon had six times as many students enrolled as Midsylvania, which meant, of course, six times the bulk of raw material from which to pick and choose for her team. Sangamon had a professional coach, paid trainers and paid rubbers; and Sangamon had a fat fund to support her in her athletic endeavours.

Midsylvania, it is almost needless to state, had none of these. Sangamon had gone through the fall, mopping up ambitious contenders, east and west, due north, north by east, and north by west. Sangamon had two players—not one, but actually two—that the experts of the New York dailies had nominated for the All-American—her fullback, Vretson, known affectionately and familiarly as the Terrible Swede; and her star end, Fay, who, in full football panoply of spiked shoes and padded knickers, had, on test, done a hundred yards in twelve seconds flat. It isn't so very often that the astigmatic Eastern sharps can see across the Appalachians when they come to make up the roster of nominees for the seasonal hall of football fame. This year, though, they had looked as far inland as Sangamon. At the peril of a severe eyestrain they had to, because Sangamon simply would not be denied.

This was what Midsylvania must go up against this coming Saturday afternoon. Wherefore the apprehension of disaster was that thick you could slice it with a knife.

They played the game out at Morehead Downs, where every year the Derby was run. Neither the baseball park nor the rutty common at the back of the University campus, where the Varsity scrubs and regulars did their stint at practise, could begin to hold the number that was due to attend this game, decent weather being vouchsafed. So Morehead Downs it was, with the lines blocked out in the turf on the inner side of the white fence that bounded the track, a little way up the home stretch, so that the judges' stand should not cut off the view of any considerable number of the spectators sitting across in the grand stand.

For the newspaper fellows they rigged up elbowroom accommodations of bench and table against the base of the judges' kiosk. There we sat—Ike Webb and the Major and Gil Boyd, who was our sporting editor, and myself, all in a row—and there we had been sitting for nearly an hour before the time for starting. Ike Webb was to do the introduction and Gil Boyd the running account of the game, play by play. My job was to keep tab of incidents and local-colour stuff generally. But the old Major was there as a spectator merely.

He certainly saw a sight. In that town we always measured multitudes by our Derby Day figures; yet even Derby Days did not often turn out a bigger crowd than the crowd that swarmed to the Downs that bright gusty December afternoon. The governor came down from the capital and most of the statehouse force came with him. There were excursions by rail in from out in the state, all of them mighty well patronised.

As for the local attendance—well, so far as compiling a directory of the able-bodied adult white population and a fair sprinkling of the black was concerned, the enumerators could have simplified and expedited their task considerably by going up and down the aisles and jotting down the names as they went. They could have made a fairly complete census of our prominent families without straying beyond the confines of the reserved-seat section at the front, or fashionable, side of the grand stand. And if a single society girl in town was absent it was because her parents or her guardian kept her at home under lock and key.

Before two o'clock, the slanting floor beneath the high-peaked red roof of the structure made you think of a big hanging garden, what with the faces and the figures of all those thousands packed in together, row after row of them, with the finery of the women standing out from the massed background in brighter patches of colour, and the little red pennons that the venders had peddled in the audience all dancing and swaying, like the petals of wind-blown flowers. That spectacle alone, viewed from our vantage place over across the race course, was worth the price of admission to anybody.

Carrying the simile a bit farther, you might have likened two sections of space in the stand to hothouses where noise was being brought into bloom, by both artificial and natural means. One of these forcing beds of sound was where Midsylvania grouped herself—faculty and students and old graduates. The other, a smaller area, held the visitors from Sangamon, two hundred strong and more, who had come down three hundred miles by special train, to root for the challengers, bringing with them a brass band and their own glee club—or a good part of it, anyhow—and their own cheer leader.

This cheer leader, being the first of a now common species ever seen in our parts, succeeded in holding the public eye mighty closely, as he stood, bareheaded and long-haired, down below on the track, with his gaudy blue-and-gold sweater on, and his big megaphone in his hand, jerking his arms and his body back and forth as he directed his chorus above in its organised cheering and its well-drilled singing of college songs.

Compared with this output, Midsylvania's cheering arose in larger volume, which was to be expected, seeing that Midsylvania so greatly excelled in numbers present, and had behind its delegations the favour of the onlookers almost to a unit'; but, even so, it seemed to lack the force and fervour of those vocal volleys arising from the ranks of the enemy. Each time Sangamon let off a yell it was platoon firing, steady and rapid and brisk; and literally it crackled on the air. When this had died away, and Midsylvania had answered back, the result somehow put you in mind of a boy whistling to keep up his courage while passing a cemetery after dark.

It is hard to express the difference in words, but, had you been there that day, you would have caught it in a jiffy. One group was certain of victory impending and expressed its certainty; the other was doubtful and betrayed it. In the intervals between the whooping and the singing Sangamon's imported band would play snatches of some rousing air, or else Midsyl-vania's band would play; between the two of them pumping up the pulsebeats of all and sundry.

I was struck by one thing—the Major maintained calm and dignity through all the preliminary excitement. In the moment of the first really big outburst, which was when the Varsity's students and former students marched in behind their band, out of the tail of my eye I caught the Major with a pencil, checking off the names of the home squad on his copy of the official programme. Knowing the old fellow as I did, I guessed he was figuring up to see how many of the players were members of Old Families. Nearly all of them were, for that matter. He even held himself in when, at two-fifteen or thereabouts, first one of the teams and then the other trotted out from under opposite ends of the grand stand and crossed the track to the field to warm up.

He asked me to point out young Morehead to him; and when I did he nodded as if in affirmation of a previous decision of his own. On my own initiative I pointed out some of the other stars to him too.

In advance we knew Sangamon was going to have the advantage of beef on her side; but I do not think anybody realised just how great the advantage was until we saw the two teams on the same ground and had opportunity to compare and appraise them, man for man. Then we saw, with an added sinking of the spirit—at least I knew my spirit sank at the inequality of the comparison—that her front line outweighed ours by pounds upon pounds of brawn.

In another regard as well, and a more essential regard, too, she showed superiority. For these champions from the upper Corn Belt had what plainly their opponents always before during the season had likewise had, but now lacked: they had an enormous conceit of themselves, a mountainous and a monumental belief in their ability to take this game away from the rival team.

They had brought it with them—this assurance—and they had fed it stall-fat beforehand; and now, with the easy and splendid insolence of lusty, pampered youth, they exhibited it openly before all these hostile eyes upon the enemy's soil. It showed in them individually and as a unit. Almost as visibly as though words of defiance had been stencilled upon their tight-laced jerkins fore and aft, they flaunted forth their confidence in themselves, somehow expressing it in their rippling leg muscles and in their broad backs and in their hunched shoulders as they bunched up into formidable close formation, and in everything they did and said in the few minutes of practice intervening before they should be at grips with their opponents.

They accepted the handclaps from the onlookers—a tribute of hospitality this was, extended by people to whom hospitality for the stranger was as sacred as their religion and as sincere as their politics—with an air which betokened, most evidently, that presently they meant to repay those who greeted them for the greeting, by achieving one of Sangamon's customary victories in Sangamon's customary workmanlike fashion. Among them Vretson, the much-advertised, loomed a greater giant above lesser giants, justifying by bulk alone his title of the Terrible Swede.

As for Midsylvania's players, upon the other hand, it seemed to me, as I watched them, that they, in turn, watched the young Gogs and Magogs who were to grapple with them in a half-fearsome, half-furtive fashion. I marked that they flinched nervously, like dÉbutantes, before the volleys of friendly applause from the crowd. It occurred to me that their thoughts must be studded with big black question marks; whereas we all could understand that no suggestion of doubtfulness punctuated the anticipations of the opposing eleven touching on the possibilities of the next two hours.

The feeling of foreboding spread like a cold contagion from the field to the press stand, affecting the newspaper men; and, becoming generally epidemic, it reached the spectators. That earlier lustiness was almost altogether lacking from the outbreak signalling the beginning of play. In the salvo there was nothing heartening. It appeared rather to be pitched in the tone of sympathetic consolation for a predestined and an impending catastrophe; and even the bark and roar of Midsylvania's yell, as all Midsylvania gave it,' seemed to have almost a hollow daunted sound to it. Where we sat we could sense this abatement of spirit with particular plainness; in fact, I rather think Major Stone was the only person there who did not sense it in its full effect and its full import.

I am not going to spend overmuch space in describing the first half of that game; this was in the days when games were divided into halves, and not quartered up into periods. Anyhow, I have forgotten a good many of the details. The principal points are what stick out in my memory. I remember that on the toss of the coin Sangamon won and kicked off. It was Vretson—no less—who drove his talented punting toe into the pigskin.

There was a sound as though some one had smote a taut bladder with a slapstick, and the ball soared upward and away, shrinking from the size of a watermelon to the size of a gourd, and from a gourd to a goose egg; and then it came whirling downward again, growing bigger as it dropped. Woolwine, our quarter, caught it and took a flying start off his shoe hobs. Fay and the other Sangamon end, whose name I have forgotten, were after him like a pair of coursing beagles after a doubling hare; and together they nailed him before he had gone twenty yards, and down he went, with Fay on top of him and What'shisname on top of Fay. When they dug the three of them out of their heap little Woolwine still had the ball under him.

As the teams lined up, boring their heads forward to a common centre, billy-goat fashion, and Morehead, who was playing end, called out the signals, “Six—eight—twenty-eight—thirty-one”—or some such combination of figures—we caught the quaver in his voice. Ike Webb, sitting next to me, gave a little groan and laid down his pencil, and put his pessimistic face in his sheltering hands.

“Listen to that tremolo note, will you?” he lamented from between his fingers. “Licked, by golly, before they start! They won't play to win, because they're scared to death already. They'll play to keep from being licked by too big a score, and that means they won't have a chance. Just you fellows watch and see if I'm not right. Ah-h! There she goes!”

We watched all right; and we saw that our boys meant to try to carry the ball through for gains. There was not a chance of that, though. They butted their heads against a stone wall until they fairly addled the football instincts in their brains. In two attempts they did not advance the ball six feet; so they tried kicking it. Young Railey punted well into Sangamon territory and now Sangamon had the ball. She lost it on a fumble, but got it back a minute or two later on a fumble slip by the other side. In their respective shortcomings as regards fumbling it was even-Stephen between the teams; but Ike Webb couldn't view the thing in any such optimistic light. He had turned into a merciless critic of the Varsity outfit.

“Aha!” he muttered dolorously as a scrimmaging tangle of forms disentangled and showed that Sangamon, by a smart bit of strategy, had gained three yards. “What did I tell you not five minutes back? Those boys lost their hearts before they even began, and now they're due to lose their heads too.”

It really looked as though Ike Webb was qualifying for clairvoyant honours, for promptly Midsylvania's defence became more and more inefficient, more and more uncertain. Sangamon had a smart field commander, and he took leeway of the advantage. He set his men to the job of jamming through; and jam through they did. It took time, though, because Midsylvania, of course, offered a measure of resistance. To me, however, it appeared to be the mechanical resistance of bodies in action rather than anything guided by a spiritual determination—if you get what I mean. It took a good deal of time; but after a while, by dint of shoving ahead with all her tonnage against Midsyl-vania's slighter and lighter displacement, the visitors forced the ball along to Midsylvania's thirty-yard line.

At this point, Sangamon suddenly changed her tactics. Collop, her captain, made a gesture with his arms and the Blue tackles dropped back a little. From the centre of the massed wedge of shapes a signal was barked out. So swiftly that the spectacle made you think of a pyramid of pool balls scattering over a pool table when the cue ball hits it hard on the nose, the visiting players shifted positions.

For ten seconds we lost sight of the ball altogether. When we saw it again it was cuddling in Vretson's vast, outspread paws. Who had passed it, or how it got there after being passed, I never knew. Magically it had materialised in his grasp in the same way that a prestidigitator's china egg is produced from a countryjake's whiskers. He tucked it into the bight of his left arm and, with his mighty right arm swinging behind him as a rudder and before him as a flail, he tore down the field, going away out to the right.

He was fast for his size—wonderfully fast, and besides, he had perfect interference to help him along. His mates, skirmishing out on his flank, threw back and bowled over the men who bored in to tackle him. In his flight he himself accounted for at least two Varsity players who sprang round the wings of his protecting line, hoping to intercept the big sprinter. One he dodged, the other he flung aside; and then he kept on and on until after a run of thirty-five yards, he flung himself through the air; and, with Cabell, of Midsylvania, clutching at the wideness between his shoulder blades, he dropped flat across Midsylvania's goal line. A groan went up from the grand stand.

There wasn't a sound from any quarter, though, as Vretson squared off to kick for a goal; but whoops of relief arose when the ball, after soaring high and straight, veered off under pressure of a puff of air and, instead of passing over the bar, struck one of the goal posts with a mellow smack and dropped back. So the score, by the rules of those times, stood four to naught.

Nearly everybody there, I guess, figured that Sangamon would promptly buttress her lead by at least four additional points, and very possibly more; but she didn't. True, she played all round and all over and all through Midsylvania during the remaining portion of the first half, but she did not score again. This was due not so much to the rebuttal fight the defenders offered, for now their playing sagged more woefully weak than ever, but to small misplays and slip-ups and seeming overconfidence on the part of Sangamon.

It may have been they were cocksure of their power to score again when they chose. Maybe they were a trifle tired. Maybe they were satisfied to postpone the slaughter-house work until toward the end of the game and make a spectacular, overwhelming finish of it. Anyhow, it struck us, in the press stand, that the reason behind their failure to push their advantage still farther, during the next ten minutes or so, was rather because of their own disinclination than because of any strategy or strength Midsylvania's plainly despondent eleven presented against them.

Along here I became aware, subconsciously at first, and then in a minute or so with a fuller sense of realisation, that Major Stone had waked up. I felt him wriggling on the bench, joggling me in the side with his elbow; and when I looked at him his face was an indignant pink and his little white goatee was bristling like a thistle pod.

He was saying something to himself, and by listening, I caught from his muttered words the purport of the change that had come into the old man's emotions, which change, as I speedily divined, was exactly what might have been expected of him. He did not have the attitude of the average spectator over in the grand stand, for his bump of local pride was not being bruised, as theirs was, by this exhibition. Nor had he grasped and assimilated the feelings of those two groups of youngsters whose cleated feet ripped up the turf in front of him.

It did not lie within his capabilities to share their youthful and, therefore, profound conviction that all which was desirable in life, here or hereafter, centred on the results of this struggle; and that the youth who failed now to acquit himself to the greater glory of his comrades and his class and his college—and, most of all, himself—would droop an abased and shameful head through all the years to come. For, as I may have remarked before, Major Stone was not a bright person, but rather a stupid one; and his viewpoint on most subjects had not altered materially since Appomattox.

That was it—it had not altered since Appomattox; and because it had not he was viewing the present event as a struggle between North and South—as a conflict into which Civil War causes and Civil War effects directly entered. Possibly you cannot understand that. But you could if you had known Major Stone and men like him, most of whom are now dead and gone. His face turned from a hot pink to a dull brick-dust red, and he gnawed at his moustache.

“It is monstrous!” I heard him say. “It is incredible! Southern sons of Southern sires, every damned one of them! And because the odds are against them they have weakened! I myself can see that they are weakening every minute. Why, the thing's incredible—that's what it is! Incredible!”

Just then the whistle blew, and the teams, which had been in a mix-up, unsnarled themselves. The Sangamon eleven came off the field; some of them were briskly trotting to prove their fitness, and some were swaggering a little as their band hit up the tune of Marching Through Georgia to play them into their quarters under the stand. But the Varsity eleven passed out of sight with shoulders that drooped and with no spring in their gaits.

Back at the tail end of their line went little Morehead, wiping his damp eyes with the dirty sleeve of his jersey. Morehead was no young Saint Laurence, to expire smilingly on a gridiron. He was not of the stuff that martyrs are made of; he was a creature, part man and part boy, and the man part of him made him furious with self-reproach, but the boy in him made him cry. I take it, some of the spectators felt almost like crying too; certainly their cheering sounded so.

One of the Red tackles—Rodney—had been disabled just before the breakaway, and I ran over to Midsylvania's quarters to find out for the paper whether he was injured to the degree of being definitely incapacitated for further participation in the game. In what, during race meets, was a refreshment establishment, under the grand stand, I obtruded upon a veritable grand lodge of sorrow.

Gadsden, the coach, who had played with the team the year before, which was his graduating year, was out in the centre of the floor making a brave pretense at being hopeful; but I do not think anybody present suffered himself to be deceived thereby. His pleas to the team to buck up and to brace up, and to go back in and fight for every point, lacked sincerity. He appeared to be haranguing them because that was the ordained thing for him to do, and not because he expected to infuse into them any part of his make-believe optimism. Lying on their backs upon blankets, with limbs relaxed, some of his hearers turned dejected faces upward. Others, sitting upright or squatted on their knees, kept their abashed heads on their breasts, staring down steadfastly at nothing at all.

Morehead was sulking by himself in a corner, winking his eyelids and wrinkling his face up to hold back the tears of his mortification. He blamed himself, I take it, for what was the fault of all. Cabell was a tousled heap, against a wall. He was flexing a bruised wrist, as though that small hurt was just now the most important thing in the world to him. Even the darky rubbers and the darky water carrier showed their sensations by their dejected faces. There was enough of downcastness in that room to supply half a dozen funerals with all the gloom they might require; the whole place exhaled the essence of a resentful depression that was as plainly to be sniffed up into the nostrils as the smells of alcohol and arnica and liniment which burdened the air and gave the accompaniment of a drug-store smell to the picture.

As I halted at the door on my way out of this melancholy spot to the scarcely less melancholy atmosphere of the open, having learned that Rodney was not really injured, somebody bumped into me, jostling me to one side; and, to my astonishment, I saw that the impetuous intruder was Major Stone. I had not known until then that he had followed me here, and I did not know now what errand could have brought him along. But he did not keep me wondering long; in fact, he did not keep me wondering at all. He burst in on them with a great “Woof!” of indignation.

Before scarcely any one there had realised that a newcomer, arriving unheralded and all unexpected, was in their midst, he stood in the middle of the littered floor, glaring about him and snorting loudly. His first words, too, were calculated not only to startle them but deeply to profane the semi-privacy of their grief and their humiliation.

“Young gentlemen,” he fairly shouted, “I am ashamed of you! And I have come here to tell you so, and to tell you why I am ashamed.”

By sight, even, he was probably a stranger to most of those who, with one accord, now stared at the little, old-fashioned figure of this invader. They straightened up. There was a rustle and a creaking of their harnessed and padded bodies. Perhaps surprise held them dumb; or perhaps they were in a humour to take a scolding, even from an outsider, feeling that they deserved it. At any rate, only one of them spoke. I think it was the voice of Gadsden, the coach, that answered back.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked. “And who the devil let you in here, anyhow?”

“You may not know me,” snapped the Major; “but I know you.” He wheeled on his heels, aiming a jabbing forefinger at this man and that. “And I know you—and I know you—and I know you—and you, and you, too, young sir, over there in the corner. What is more, I knew your fathers before you.”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it? This much of it: Your fathers before you were gallant Southern gentlemen—the bearers of honoured names; names revered in this state and in the Southern armies. That is what your fathers were. And what have you, their sons, proved yourselves to be this day? Cravens—that is the word. Cravens! Out of all the South you were chosen to represent your native land against these Northerners; and how have you repaid the trust imposed in you? By quitting—by showing the white feather, like a flock of dunghill cockerels—by raising the white flag at the first attack!” A babble of resentful voices arose:

“Say, look here; now—”

“What do you know about football?”

“Who gave you any license to butt in here?”

“Say, that's pretty rough!”

He broke into the confused chorus of their protests, silencing the interrupters by the stormy blare of his rejoinder. He was so terribly in earnest that they just had to hearken.

“I know nothing of this game you have essayed to play. Before to-day I never saw it played; and if this miserable exhibition by you is a sample of the game I hope never to see it played again. But I know courage when I see it and I know cowardice when I see it.”

He levelled his condemning finger at little Morehead and focused his glare upon that un-happy youth.

“Your name is Morehead! Your grandfather was a great governor of this great state. Your father was my companion in arms upon the field of battle—and no braver man ever breathed, sir. This historic inclosure bears the honoured name of your honoured line—Morehead Downs. You are the chosen leader of these companions of yours. And how have you led them to-day? How have you acquitted yourself of your trust? I ask you that—how?” He halted, out of breath.

“The other team is stronger. They've got us outclassed. Look—why, look at the reputation they've got all over this country! What—what chance have we against them?”

The confession came from little Morehead haltingly, as though he spoke against his own will in his own defence.

“Damn their reputation!” shouted Major Stone. “Your very words are an admission of the things I allege against you, and against all of you here. Concede that your antagonists are stronger than you, man for man. Concede that they outclass you in experience. Is that any reason why they should outclass you in courage and in determination? Your father and the fathers of more than half of the rest of you served in an army that for four years defended our beloved country against a foe immensely stronger than they were—stronger in men, in money, in munitions, in food, in supplies, in guns—stronger in everything except valour.

“Suppose, because of the odds against them, your people had lost heart from the very outset, as you yourselves have lost heart here today. Would that great war have lasted for four years? Or would it have lasted for four months? Would the Southern Confederacy have endured until it no longer had the soldiers to fill the gaps and hold the lines; or food for the bellies of those soldiers who were left; or powder and lead for their guns? Or would it have surrendered after the first repulse, as you have surrendered? Answer me that, some of you!

“These Northerners are game clear through; I can tell that. Their ancestors before them were brave men—the Southern Confederacy could never have been starved out and bled white by a breed of cowards. And these young men here—these splendid young Americans from up yonder in that Northern country—have the same gallant spirit their people showed forty years ago against your people. But you—you have lost the spirit of your race, that surely must have been born in you. You are going to let these Yankees run right over you—your behaviour proves it—and not fight back. That is what I charge against you. That is what I am here to tell you.”

“How about me?” put in one of the blanketed contingent of his audience. “My people were all Unionists.”

“Your name?” demanded the Major of him. “Speedman.”

“A son of the late Colonel Henry T. Speedman?”

“His nephew.”

“I knew your uncle and your uncle's brothers and your grandfather. They were Union-men from principle; and I admired them for it, even though we differed, and even though they took up arms against their own kinsmen and fought on the opposite side. They wore the blue from conviction; but when the war was over your uncle, being a Southerner, helped to save his native state from carpetbaggery and bayonet rule. That was the type of man your uncle was. I regret to note that you did not inherit his qualities. I particularly observed your behaviour out there on that field yonder a while ago. You quit, young man—you quit like a dog!”

“Say, look here; you're an old man, and that's enough to save you!” Speedman suddenly was sobbing in his mortification. “But—but you've got no right to say things like that to me. You've—you've-” A gulp cut the miserable youngster's utterance short. He choked and plaintively tried again: “If we can't win we can't win—and that's all there is to it! Isn't it, fellows?”

He looked to his companions in distress for comfort; but all of them, as though mesmerised, were looking at Major Stone. It dawned on me, watching and listening across the threshold, that some influence—some electric appeal to an inner consciousness of theirs—was beginning to galvanise them, taking the droop out of their spines, and making their frames tense where there had been a sag of nonresistance, and putting sparks of resentment into their eyes. The transformation had been almost instantaneously accomplished, but it was plainly visible.

“I am not expecting that you should win,” snapped the Major, turning Speedman's words into an admonition for all of them. “I do not believe it is humanly possible for you to win. There is nothing disgraceful in being fairly defeated; the disgrace is in accepting defeat without fighting back with all your strength and all your will and all your skill and all your strategy and all your tactics. And that is exactly what I have just seen you doing. And that, judging by all the indications, is exactly what you will go on doing during the remaining portion of this affair.”

There were no more interruptions. For perhaps two or three minutes more, then, the old Major went steadily on, saying his say to the end. Saying it, he wasn't the Old Major I had known before; he was not pottering and ponderous; he did not clothe his thoughts in cumbersome, heavy phrases. He fairly bit the words off—short, bitter, scorching words—and spat them out in their faces. He did not plead with them; nor—except by indirection—did he invoke a sentiment that was bound to be as much a part of them as the nails on their fingers or the teeth in their mouths.

And, somehow, I felt—and I knew they felt—that here, in this short, stumpy white-haired form, stood the Old South, embodied and typified, with all its sectional pride and all its sectional devotion—yes, and all its sectional prejudices. All at once, in the midst of a sentence, he checked up; and then, staring hard at them through a pause, he spoke his final message: “You are of the seed of heroes. Try to remember that when you go back out yonder before that great crowd. You are the sons of men who had sand, who had bottom, who had all the things a fighting man should have. Try—if you can—to remember it!”

Out from behind the group that had clustered before the speaker, darted a diminutive darky—Midsylvania's self-appointed water carrier:

“He done jest said it!” whooped the little negro, dancing up and down in frenzy. “He done jest said it! 'Cinnamon Seed an' Sandy Bottom! 'Dat's it! Cinnamon Seed an' Sandy Bottom!'—same ez you sez it w'en you sings Dixie Land. Dem's de words to win by! W'ite folks, youse done heared de lesson preached frum de true tex'. Come on! Le's us go an' tear dem Sangamonders down! 'Cinnamon Seed an' Sandy Bottom!' Oh, gloree, gloree, hallelujah!”

He rocked back on his splay feet, his knees sprung forward, his mouth wide open, and his eyes popping out of his black face.

The Major did not look the little darky's way. Settling his slouch hat on his head, he faced about and out he stalked; and I, following along after him, was filled with conflicting emotions, for, as it happened, my father was a Confederate soldier, too, and I had been bred up on a mixed diet of Robert E. Lee, N. B. Forrest and Albert Sidney Johnston.

I followed him back to our post, he saying nothing at all on the way and I likewise silent. I scrouged past him to my place alongside Ike Webb and sat down, and tried in a few words to give Ike and Gil Boyd a summary of the sight I had just witnessed. And when I was done I illustrated my brief and eager narrative by pointing with a flirt of my thumb to Major Stone, stiffly erect on my left hand, with his chest protruded and his head held high in a posture faintly suggestive of certain popular likenesses of the late Napoleon Bonaparte; and on his elderly face was the look of one who, having sowed good seed in receptive loam, confidently expects an abundant and a gratifying harvest.

It was a different team which came out for the second half of that game; not exactly a jaunty team, nor yet a boisterous one, but rather a team that were grimly silent, indicating by their silence a certain preparedness and a certain resolution for the performance of that which is claimed to speak louder than words—action.

The onlookers, I judged, saw the difference almost instantly and realised that from some source, somehow, Morehead's men had gathered unto themselves a new power of will, which presently they meant to express physically. And three minutes later Sangamon found herself breasted by a mechanism that had in its composition the springiness of an earnest desire and a sincere determination, whereas before, in emergencies, it had expressed no more than sullen and downhearted desperation.

Now from the very outset there was resilience behind its formations and active intelligence behind its movements, guiding and shaping them. The confronting line might give under the pressure of superior weight, but it bounced right back. At once it was made manifest that the Red eleven would not thenceforward be content merely to defend, but would have the effrontery actually to attack, and attack again, and to keep on attacking. No longer was it a case of hammer falling on anvil; two hammers were battering against one another, nose to nose now, and in one stroke there was as much buoyancy as in the other.

In my eagerness to reach my climax I am getting ahead of my story. Let's go back a bit: The whistle blew. The antagonists having swapped goals, Midsylvania now had what benefit was to be derived from the wind, which blew out of the West at a quartering angle across the field. Following the kick-off an interchange of punts ensued. Midsylvania apparently elected to continue these kicking operations indefinitely; whereupon it is probable the Sangamon strategists jumped at the conclusion that, realising the hopelessness of overcoming the weight presented against them, the locals meant to make a kicking match of it. Be that as it may, they accepted the challenge, if challenge it was, and a punting duel ensued, with no noteworthy fortunes falling to either eleven.

I think it was early in this stage of the proceedings, after some mighty brisk scrimmaging, when the strangers, by coming into violent physical contact with their opponents, discovered that a new spirit inspired and governed the others, and began to apprehend that, after all, this would not be a walkover for them; but that they must fight, and fight hard, to hold their present lead, and fight even harder if they expected to swell that lead.

When, at the first opportunity for a forward push, the Red line came at the Blue with an impetuosity theretofore lacking from its frontal assaults, you could almost see the ripple of astonishment running down the spines of the Northerners as they braced themselves to meet and stay the onslaught. Anyhow, you could imagine you saw it; certainly there were puzzled looks on the faces of some of them as they emerged from the mÊlÉe.

With appreciative roars, the crowd greeted these evidences of a newer and more comforting aspect to the situation. Each time some Midsylvania player caught the booted ball as it came tumbling out of the skies the grand stand rocked to the noise; each time Midsylvania sent it flying back to foreign ground it rocked some more; each time the teams clashed, then locked together, it was to be seen that the Midsylvanians held their ground despite the efforts of their bulkier rivals to uproot and overthrow them.

And, at that, the air space beneath the peaked roof was ripped all to flinders by exultant blares from sundry thousands of lungs. Under the steady pounding feet the floor of the grand stand became a great bass drum, which was never silent; and all the myriad red flags danced together. Into the struggle an element of real dash had entered and mightily it uplifted the spectators. They knew now that, though the Varsity team might be beaten, and probably would be, they would not be disgraced. It would be an honourable defeat before overpowering odds, and one stoutly resisted to the end by all that intelligence, plus pluck, could do.

There was no fault now to be found with Midsylvania's captain. Little Morehead, with his face a red smear, was playing all over the lot. The impact of a collision with a bigger frame than his, had slammed him face down against the ground, skinning one cheek and bloodying his nose. He looked like a mad Indian in streaky war paint, and he played like one. He seemed to be everywhere at once, exhorting, commanding, leading; by shouted precept and by reckless example giving the cue to his teammates.

I suppose the latter half was about half over when the Sangamon team changed their tactics and, no longer content to play safe and exchange punts, sought to charge through and gain ground by sheer force. Doubtlessly their decision was based on sound principles of reason; but by reason of certain insurmountable obstacles, personified in eleven gouging, wrestling, panting, sweating youths, they were effectually deterred, during a breathless period of minutes, from so doing.

It was inevitable that a break must come sooner or later. It was not humanly possible for any team or any two teams to maintain that punishing pace very long without giving way somewhere.

The ball, after various vicissitudes, was in the middle of the field, and the Northerners had it. As the Blue tackles slipped back of their comrades stealthily, and Vretson, stealing forward, poised himself to take the catch, we on the press benches realised that Sangamon meant to undertake a repetition of the device that had won her lone goal for her. Thirty minutes earlier it would have seemed the logical move to try. Now, in view of everything, it was audacious.

At that, though, I guess it was Sangamon's best card, even though Midsylvania would be forewarned and forearmed by their earlier disastrous experience to take measures for combating the play. Everything depended on getting Vretson away to a flying start and then keeping his interference intact.

The captain chanted the code numbers. The Blue press shifted in quick shuttlelike motions, and the ball, beautifully and faultlessly handled, was flipped back, aiming straight for Vretson's welcoming grasp. Simultaneously something else happened. That something else was Morehead.

As the ball was passed he moved. There was a hole in Sangamon's breastworks, made by the spreading out of her men. It was a little hole and a hole which instantaneously closed up again, being stoppered by an interposing torso; but in that flash of space Morehead saw the opening and, without being touched, came whizzing straight through it like a small, compact torpedo. Head in and head down, he crashed into Vretson in the same tenth-second when the ball reached Vretson's fingers. With his skull, his shoulders, his arms, and his trunk he smashed against the giant.

Vretson staggered sideways. The ball escaped from his grip; and, striking the earth, it took one lazy bound, and then another; but no more. As it bounced the second time, Morehead, bending double from his hips, slid under it with outspread arms, scooped it up to his breast, and was off, travelling faster, I am sure, than Morehead in all his life had ever travelled. He was clear and away, going at supertopspeed, while Vretson still spun and rocked on his heels.

Obeying the signal for the play the majority of the Sangamon team already had darted off to their right to make a living barrier upon the threatened side of the imaginary lane their star was due to follow. It behooved them to reverse the manouvre. Digging their heels into the earth for brakes they wheeled round, scuttling back and spreading out to intercept the fugitive; but he was already past and beyond Vretson, and nearing the line of cross-angle along which the nearest of his pursuers must go to encounter him. Before him, along the eastern boundary of Sangamon's territory, was a clear stretch of cross-marked turf.

Vretson recovered himself and made a stem chase of it, and Vretson could run, as I said before; but it would have been as reasonable to expect a Jersey bull to overtake a swamp rabbit when the swamp rabbit had the start of the bull, and was scared to death besides, as to expect Vretson to catch Morehead. The Red captain travelled three feet for every two the bigger man travelled. Twenty yards—thirty, forty—he sped, and not a tackler's hand was laid on him. With the pack of his adversaries tagging out behind him like hounds behind a hare, he pitched over the goal line and lay there, his streaming nose in the grass roots, with the precious ball under him, and the Sangamon players tumbling over him as they came tailing up. Single-handed, on a fluky chance, Morehead had duplicated and bettered what Vretson, with assistance, had done.

The crowd simply went stark, raving crazy and behaved accordingly. But the Varsity section in the grand stand and the clump of blanketted Varsity substitutes and scrubs on the side lines were the craziest spots of all.

After this there isn't so very much to be told. Midsylvania kicked for a goal, but failed, as Sangamon had done. The ball struck the crossbar between the white goal posts and flopped back; and during the few remaining minutes of play neither side tallied a point, though both tried hard enough and Sangamon came very near it once, but failed—thanks to the same inspired counterforces that had balked her in similar ambitions all through this half.

So, at the end, with the winter sun going down red in the west, and the grand stand all red with dancing flags to match it, the score stood even—four to four.

Officially a tie, yes; but not otherwise—not by the reckoning of the populace. That Midsylvania, outmanned and outweighted as she was, should have played those Middle West champions to a standstill was, in effect, a victory—so the crowd figured—and fitting to be celebrated on that basis, which promptly it was.

Out from the upstanding ranks of the multitude, down from the stand, across the track and into the field came the Varsity students, clamouring their joy, and their band came with them, and others, unattached, came trailing after them. Some were dancing dervishes and some were human steam whistles, and all the rest were just plain lunatics. They fell into an irregular weaving formation, four or six abreast, behind the team, with Morehead up ahead, riding upon the shoulders of two of his fellows; and round the gridiron they started, going first between one pair of goal posts and then between the other pair. Doubtlessly the band played; but what tune they elected to play nobody knew, because nobody could hear it—not even the musicians themselves.

As the top of the column, completing its first circuit, swung down the gridiron toward the judges' stand, Morehead pointed toward where we sat and, from his perch on their shoulders, called down something to those who bore him. At that, a deputation of about half a dozen broke out of the mass and charged straight for us. For a moment it must have seemed to the crowd that this detachment contemplated a physical assault upon some obnoxious newspaper man behind our bench, for they dived right in among us, laying hands upon one of our number, heaving him bodily upward, and bearing him away a prisoner.

Half a minute later Major Putnam Stone, somewhat dishevelled as to his attire, was also mounted on a double pair of shoulders and was bobbing along at the front of the procession, side by side with young Morehead. Judging by his expression, I should say the Major was enjoying the ride. Without knowing the whys and the wherefores of it, the spectators derived that in some fashion this little, old, white-haired man was esteemed by Midsylvania's representatives to have had a share in the achieved result.

As this conviction sank home, the exultant yelling mounted higher and higher still. I think it was along here the members of the band quit trying to be heard and stopped their playing, and took their horns down from their faces.

Immediately after this still another strange figure attained a conspicuous place in the parade: A little darky, mad with joy, and wearing a red-and-gray sweater much too roomy for him, came bounding across the field, with an empty water bucket in one hand. He caught up with the front row of the marchers; and, scuttling along backward, directly in front of them, he began calling out certain words in a sort of slogan, repeating them over and over again, until those nearest him detected the purport of his utterances and started chanting them in time with him.

Presently, as the chorus of definite sounds and the meaning of the sounds spread along down the column, the Varsity boys took up the refrain, and it rose and fell in a great, thundering cadence. And then everybody made out its substance, the words being these:

“Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom! Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom! CINNAMON SEED AND SANDY BOTTOM!”

The sun, following its usual custom, continued to go down, growing redder and redder as it went; and Midsylvania, over and above the triumph it had to celebrate and was celebrating, had also these three things now added unto her: A new college yell, in this perfectly meaningless line from an old song; a new cheer leader—her first, by the way—in the person of a ragged black water boy; and a new football idol to take to her heart, the same being an elderly gentleman who knew nothing at all of the science of football, and doubtlessly cared less—an idol who in the fullness of time would become a tradition, to be treasured along with the noseless statue of Henry Clay and the beech tree under which Daniel Boone slept one night.

So that explains why, each year after the main game, when the team of a bigger and stronger Midsylvania have broken training, they drink a rising toast to the memory of Major Putnam Stone, deceased; whereat, as afore-stated, there are no heel-taps whatsoever.