ck."

Mahan boosted the ball seventy yards, and Haughton said:

"What kind of a kick is that?"

Mahan thought it was a great kick.

"How do you think any ends can cover that?" said Haughton.

Mahan thereupon kicked a couple more, low ones, but they went about as
far.

"Who told you _you_ could kick?" quoth Haughton. "You must kick high
enough for your ends to cover the distance."

"Take it easy and don't get excited," Donovan was whispering to Mahan
on the side. "Take your time, Ned."

But Mahan continued kicking from bad to worse. Haughton was getting
disgusted, and finally remarked:

"Your ends never can cover those punts."

Mahan then kicked one straight up over his head, and the first word ever
uttered by him on the Harvard field, was his reply to Haughton:

"I guess almost any end can cover _that_ punt," he said.

Donovan tells me that he used to carry in his pocket a few blank
cartridges for starting sprinters. Sitting on a bench with some friends,
on Soldiers' Field, one day he reached into his hip pocket for some
loose tobacco. Unconsciously he stuffed into the heel of his pipe a
blank cartridge that had become mixed with the tobacco. The gun club was
practicing within hearing distance of the field. As Donovan lighted his
pipe the cartridge went off. He thought he was shot. Leaping to his feet
he ran down the field, his friends after him.

"I was surprised at my own physical condition--at my being able to stand
so well the shock of being shot," says Donovan in telling the story. "My
friends thought also that I was shot. But when I slowed up, still
bewildered, and they caught up with me, they were puzzled to see my face
covered with powder marks and a broken pipe stem sticking out of my
mouth.

"Not until then did any of us realize what had really happened. The
cartridge had grazed my nose slightly, but outside of that I was all
right. Since then I am very careful what I put in my tobacco."

Eddie is known as "Pooch Donovan's pet." Probably the bluest time that
Donovan ever had--in fact, he says it was the bluest--was when Eddie
Mahan had an off-day in the Stadium. That was the day when Cornell beat
Harvard. Mahan himself says it was the worst day he ever had in his
life, and he blames himself.

"It was just as things will come sometimes," Pooch said to me. "Nobody
knows why they will come, but come they will once in a while."

"Burr, the great Harvard captain," said Pooch, "was a natural bor