a victory over Claflin, and the
audience yelled until the roof seemed to shake. Coach Robey gave a
resume of the season, thanked the school for its support of the team,
pledged the best efforts of everyone concerned and, while refusing to
say so in so many words, hinted that Brimfield would have the long end
of the score on the twenty-fifth. After that the football excitement
grew and spread and took possession of the school like an epidemic.
Recitations became farces, faculty fumed and threatened--and bore it,
and some one hundred and fifty boys fixed their gaze on the twenty-fifth
of November and lived breathlessly in the future.

There was a second mass meeting on Saturday, a meeting that ended in a
parade up and down the Row, much noise and a vast enthusiasm. Brimfield
had met Southby Academy in the afternoon and had torn the visitors to
tatters, scoring almost at will and sending the hopes of her adherents
soaring into the zenith. To be sure, Southby had presented a rather weak
team, but, as an offset to that, Brimfield had played without the
services of the regular right end, without her captain and with a
back-field largely substitute during most of the game. There was nothing
wrong with Andy Miller, but it was thought best to save him for the
final conflict. The last fortnight of a football season is a hard period
for the captain, no matter how smoothly things have progressed; and
Brimfield had had a particularly fortunate six weeks. Andy Miller was
not the extremely nervous type, but, nevertheless, he had lost some
fourteen pounds during the month and was far "finer" than Danny Moore
wanted to see him. So Andy, dressed in "store clothes," saw the Southby
game from the side-line, hobnobbing with the coaches and Joe Benson,
still on crutches, and with Norton, who, after smashing out two
touchdowns in the first period, was also taken out to be saved.

There was no trace of the slump left, and the final score that Saturday
afternoon was 39 to 7, and the school was hysterically delighted, which
accounts for the added enthusiasm which kept them marching up and down
the Row in the evening until the patience of a lenient faculty was
exhausted, and Mr. Conklin, prodded into action by a telephone message
from the Cottage, appeared and dispersed the assembly.

The second team was to go out of business on Thursday, and several
members of it were eager to end the season with a banquet. Freer and
Saunders dropped in on Ste