the Siwash team comes out I'm
going to get up and give as near a correct imitation of a Roman mob and
a Polish riot as my throat will stand; and if we put a crimp in the
large-footed, humpy-shouldered behemoths we're going up against this
afternoon, I'm going out to-night and burn the City Hall. Any Siwash man
who is a gentleman would do it. I'll probably have to run like thunder
to beat some of them to it.

You know how it is, old man. Or maybe you don't, because you made all
your end runs on the Glee Club. But I played football all through my
college course and the microbe is still there. In the fall I think
football, talk football, dream football, even though I haven't had a
suit on for six years. And when I go out to the field and see little old
Siwash lining up against a bunch of overgrown hippos from a university
with a catalogue as thick as a city directory, the old
mud-and-perspiration smell gets in my nostrils, and the desire to get
under the bunch and feel the feet jabbing into my ribs boils up so
strong that I have to hold on to myself with both hands. If you've never
sat on a hard board and wanted to be between two halfbacks with your
hands on their shoulders, and the quarter ready to sock a ball into your
solar plexus, and eleven men daring you to dodge 'em, and nine thousand
friends and enemies raising Cain and keeping him well propped up in the
grandstands--if you haven't had that want you wouldn't know a healthy,
able-bodied want if you ran into it on the street.

Of course, I never got any further along than a scrub. But what's the
odds? A broken bone feels just as grand to a scrub as to a star. I
sometimes think a scrub gets more real football knowledge than a varsity
man, because he doesn't have to addle his brain by worrying about
holding his job and keeping his wind, and by dreaming that he has
fumbled a punt and presented ninety-five yards to the hereditary enemies
of his college. I played scrub football five years, four of 'em under
Bost, the greatest coach who ever put wings on the heels of a
two-hundred-pound hunk of meat; and while my ribs never lasted long
enough to put me on the team, what I didn't learn about the game you
could put in the other fellow's eye.

Say, but it's great, learning football under a good coach. It's the
finest training a man can get anywhere on this old globule. Football is
only the smallest thing you learn. You learn how to be patient when what
you want to do is to