I have to hog-tie
him and teach it to him. What did he say his name was? February? March?
That was it. It's kind of a chilly name. I'll make it a point to scrape
acquaintance with him. He's a born golfer. His calm indifference when
Blair tried to 'take him down' was beautiful to see. He's the sort of
fellow that would smile if he made a foozle in a medal play."

West drew a golf ball from his pocket and, throwing it on the turf, gave
it a half-shot off toward the river, following leisurely after it and
pondering on the possibility of making a crack golfer out of a country
lad in a straw hat.

Over on the gridiron, meanwhile, the candidates for football honors were
limbering up in a way that greatly surprised not a few of the
inexperienced. It is one thing to watch the game from the grand stand or
side-lines and another to have an awkward, wobbly, elusive spheroid
tossed to the ground a few feet from you and be required to straightway
throw yourself upon it in such manner that when it stops rolling it will
be snugly stowed between you and the ground. If the reader has played
football he will know what this means. If he has not--well, there is no
use trying to explain it to him. He must get a ball and try it
for himself.

But even this exercise may lose its terrors after a while, and when at
the end of an hour or more the lads were dismissed, there were many
among them, who limped back to their rooms sore and bruised, but proudly
elated over their first day with the pigskin. Even to the youth in the
straw hat it was tiresome work, although not new to him, and after
practice was over, instead of joining in the little stream that eddied
back to the academy grounds, he struck off to where a long straggling
row of cedars and firs marked the course of the river. Once there he
found himself standing on a bluff with the broad, placid stream
stretching away to the north and south at his feet. The bank was some
twenty feet high and covered sparsely with grass and weeds; and a few
feet below him a granite bowlder stuck its lichened head outward from
the cliff, forming an inviting seat from which to view the sunset across
the lowland opposite. The boy half scrambled, half fell the short
distance, and, settling himself in comfort on the ledge, became at once
absorbed in his thoughts.

Perhaps he was thinking a trifle sadly of the home which he had left
back there among the Maine hills, and which must have seemed a very long
way