the second and third
brown bag, and doesn't a pitcher do anything but pitch, and wh----?"

"You're on," said papa.

After that Ivy didn't miss a game during all the time that the team
played in the home town. She went without a new hat, and didn't care
whether Jean Valjean got away with the goods or not, and forgot whether
you played third hand high or low in bridge. She even became chummy with
Undine Meyers, who wasn't her kind of a girl at all. Undine was thin in
a voluptuous kind of way, if such a paradox can be, and she had red lips,
and a roving eye, and she ran around downtown without a hat more than was
strictly necessary. But Undine and Ivy had two subjects in common. They
were baseball and love. It is queer how the limelight will make heroes
of us all.

Now "Pug" Coulan, who was red-haired, and had shoulders like an ox, and
arms that hung down to his knees, like those of an orang-outang,
slaughtered beeves at the Chicago stockyards in winter. In the summer he
slaughtered hearts. He wore mustard colored shirts that matched his
hair, and his baseball stockings generally had a rip in them somewhere,
but when he was on the diamond we were almost ashamed to look at Undine,
so wholly did her heart shine in her eyes.

Now, we'll have just another dash or two of local color. In a small town
the chances for hero worship are few. If it weren't for the traveling
men our girls wouldn't know whether stripes or checks were the thing in
gents' suitings. When the baseball season opened the girls swarmed on
it. Those that didn't understand baseball pretended they did. When the
team was out of town our form of greeting was changed from,
"Good-morning!" or "Howdy-do!" to "What's the score?" Every night the
results of the games throughout the league were posted up on the
blackboard in front of Schlager's hardware store, and to see the way in
which the crowd stood around it, and streamed across the street toward
it, you'd have thought they were giving away gas stoves and hammock
couches.

Going home in the street car after the game the girls used to gaze
adoringly at the dirty faces of their sweat-begrimed heroes, and then
they'd rush home, have supper, change their dresses, do their hair, and
rush downtown past the Parker Hotel to mail their letters. The baseball
boys boarded over at the Griggs House, which is third-class, but they
used their tooth-picks, and held the postmortem of the day's game out in
front