thing happened to us. You know how you are always
running up against mastodons in the big town. You see about every one
who is big enough to die in scare-heads. Taking a stroll down Fifth
Avenue with an old residenter and having him tell about the people you
pass is like having the hall of fame directory read off to you. Well,
one Sunday night when we were blowing in our little fifty cents apiece
on one of those Italian table d'hote dinners with red varnish free,
Allie looked across the room and began to tremble. "Look at that chap,"
says he.

"Who is he?" I asked, getting interested. "Roosevelt?"

"Roosevelt nothing," he says scornfully. "Man alive, that's Jarvis!"

I just dropped my jaw and stared. Of course you remember Jarvis, the
great football player. At that time I guess most of the college boys in
America said their prayers to him. Out West we students used to read of
his terrific line plunges on the eastern fields and of his titanic
defense when his team was hard pushed, and wonder if any of us would
ever become great enough to meet him and shake him by the hand. What did
we care for the achievements of Achilles and Hector and Hercules and
other eminent hasbeens, which we had to soak up at the rate of forty
lines of Greek a day? They had old Homer to write them up--the best man
ever in the business. But they were too tame for us. I've caught myself
speculating more than once on what Achilles would have done if Jarvis
had tried to make a gain through him. Achilles was probably a pretty
good spear artist, and all that, but if Jarvis had put his
leather-helmeted head down and hit the line low--about two points south
of the solar plexus--they would have carted Ac. away in a cab right
there, invulnerability and all.

That's about what we thought of Jarvis. We had his pictures pasted all
over our training quarters along with those of the other
super-dreadnoughts from the colleges that break into literature, and I
imagine that if he had suddenly appeared back in Jonesville we should
have put our heads right down and kow-towed until he gave us permission
to get up. And here we were, sitting in the same cafe with him. I'll
tell you, I had never felt the glory of living in the metropolis and
prowling around the ankles of the big chiefs more vividly than right
there in that room the night we first saw him.

We sat and watched Jarvis while our meat course got cold. There was no
mistaking him--some people have their lo