The first suggestion of the Triangular League came from a certain aspiring and nimble-witted graduate of the Newbury Latin named John Smith, whose surname, occurring on every page of every daily paper, should safely conceal his identity from any over-curious reader of this story. Moreover, it may be asserted with truth that the particular John Smith who called the first meeting of representatives of the three schools is not to be found on any of the eighteen pages of Smiths in the last Boston directory. It is enough for our purpose to know that he looked over the material in the upper half of the Newbury Latin and found it to his liking—good for the present and promising for the future. He considered within himself, with what he imagined to be uncommon shrewdness, that it is better for a school to be at the head of a small league than to swell the troop at the conqueror’s heels in a larger one. His reason for selecting Westcott’s and the Trowbridge School as complements to the Newbury Latin in this laudably patriotic scheme was that while they contained decent fellows and were nominally fair rivals, they were probably beatable without killing exertion. This last item was not included in the argument for the organization which he presented to the first meeting. His speech here took loftier grounds, such as the charms of an alliance between naturally friendly schools, and the splendid athletic ideals for which the new league would stand.

Either John Smith’s idea or John Smith’s argument carried weight, for the league was formed, and the three schools pledged themselves to maintain it and abide by its rules. In recognition of his unselfish services in behalf of the cause, and at the suggestion of Mr. Snyder, an instructor at Trowbridge, who insisted that the direction of affairs should be in the hands of some mature person, Mr. John Smith was elected president. It was voted that a managing committee consisting of two representatives from each school, together with the president, ex officio, should be empowered to draw up rules, arrange schedules, select officials, and act as general board of control.

The first meeting of this permanent committee was held at Westcott’s, in Boston, just before the end of the school year. After the visitors had departed, Sumner and Talbot remained behind to discuss events from the Westcott point of view.

“It’s going to be great!” opined Sumner, with his usual outburst of enthusiasm for what he approved. “Everything was pleasant and straight, and nobody tried to get the advantage of anybody else.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” answered Joe Talbot, commonly called “Pete.” The origin of this nickname is involved in obscurity. Some boys derived it from a character in a play; some asserted that Joe’s family had given him the name in jest when he was a toddler. Steve Wilmot, the wag of the class, maintained that it was descriptive,—he was called Pete because he looked Pete,—and this explanation was on the whole popular, especially as Talbot stoutly protested against it.

“Why not?” demanded Sumner.

“I’ve no confidence in that Smith. He’s too oily and smug. He’s got some scheme he means to work.”

“Shucks!” retorted Jack. “Your brother Bob has prejudiced you against him with his talk about that old football squabble. If I were a junior in college, like Bob, I’d try to forget about school rows.”

“Those are the things you remember longest,” Pete answered wisely. “You can’t change the facts, can you? You can’t make a low trick any better by forgetting it. If it happened, it’s history, as much as Bunker Hill. It shows the kind of man Smith is.”

“Was!” corrected Jack. “That was a long time ago, and he’s probably changed as much as we have since we came into the sixth together. Just think what little fools we were then, how we thought the verb amo was too hard to learn, and cried when Mr. Lawton lectured us, and Mussy used to send us out of French every day for whispering in class.”

“We weren’t anything but kids then. Neither of us was over twelve.” Talbot spoke as if seventeen, which was their present age, represented the climax of maturity.

“I was just trying to make you see that people change. Smith has changed too.”

“Perhaps he has,” growled Talbot, “but I don’t believe it’s for the better. He’s got us into the league just because he thinks Newbury can beat us. You don’t suppose he’s doing it out of love for us, do you?”

“No doubt he thinks we are a good crowd for his school to tie up with,” answered Sumner, with ready complacency. “I really believe those fellows would rather beat us than any other school, but that’s because they are jealous of us. We are only a private school, more than half of us little kids in knickerbockers, but we have the inside track in Harvard, and we’re on the top socially. They don’t like that.”

“It’s the little kids and getting into college so early that spoils our athletics,” remarked Talbot. “Newbury is a public endowed school with lots of big fellows who don’t go to college, and Trowbridge is a boarding-school in the country where the fellows have nothing to do but play games all day. We aren’t anything but a school building in town and a playground in Brookline.”

“And Adams’s,” put in Sumner.

Adams’s was the house of the instructor who lived at the athletic field. It contained a schoolroom for such boys as were condemned to prepare the next day’s lessons before they left the field in the afternoon, and quarters for a limited number of boarding pupils.

“Adams’s!” exclaimed Pete. “What good is that? A half-dozen little kids who play on the fourth or third, and a few older fellows whose parents are abroad or can’t stand them at home. There wasn’t a fellow there last year who did anything for the school.”

“There was Pitkin,” Sumner remarked. “He’d have made the second crew if he hadn’t caught the measles.”

“He might,” responded Talbot, in a tone which implied that he probably wouldn’t. “But what’s Pitkin, anyway?”

“Ben Tracy is going there next year,” went on Sumner, “and that cousin Louis of his who lives in Worcester, and some one from New Jersey. There may be some other new fellows.”

“The usual orphan asylum!” commented Talbot, savagely. “It’s four to one that none of ’em will be good for anything. You always see things about one hundred per cent better than they really are.”

“That’s not half so bad as seeing them one hundred per cent worse than they are, as you do, you old growler!” retorted his friend, with a laugh.

“They can’t be a hundred per cent worse,” maintained Talbot. “That’s a logical impossibility. It would bring ’em below the zero point.”

And then, being boys, in spite of their advanced age and the seriousness of their interest and the fact that both, avowedly at least, were putting every available minute into their preparation for the next week’s battle with the Harvard preliminaries, they wrangled for a good quarter of an hour over the possibility—logical, actual, or theoretical—of things being a hundred per cent worse than they were without reaching the vanishing point. The reader will be spared this argument. If he is a boy, he can manufacture it for himself; if a grown-up, he has only to listen quietly to a knot of boys waiting in idleness for a bell to ring or a train to appear, and he will understand how it is done.

When the discussion had run its length, they recurred naturally to the first theme of conversation. It was Pete who reintroduced the topic of the new league.

“Whether Smith is straight or crooked,” he said, “he certainly expects his school to come out ahead. I’d give something to beat him at his little game.”

“Wouldn’t it be great!” Sumner’s exclamation was like an anticipatory smack of the lips; his eyes were fixed in a fervent but unseeing stare on the blank wall, his face beamed with delight at the mental foretaste of the joys of triumph. “We may do it, too!”

“And we may not!” answered Talbot, rising. “Let’s get after those French sentences.”