rms, whither I know not, but to a better world that
this I feel certain, and one to which his baby brothers had journeyed
before him.

Virginia Jeanette arrived November 22d, 1899, and has already learned to
kick at the umpire when her meals are not furnished as promptly as she
has reason to think they should be. She is a strong, healthy baby, and
bids fair to remain with us for some years to come.

Before returning again to the ball field, on which the greater portion
of my life has been spent, I wish to record the fact that all that I
have and all that I have earned in the way both of money and reputation
in later years I owe not to myself, but to Mrs. Anson. She has been to
me a helpmeet in the truest and best sense of the word, rejoicing with
me in the days of my success and sympathizing with me in the days of my
adversity.

It was owing to her good counsel that I braced up in the days when she
was my sweetheart, and it was to please her that I have staid braced up
ever since, and am consequently still strong in mind and limb and as
healthy a specimen of an athlete as you can find in a year's travel,
albeit a little too heavy to run the bases still and play the game of
ball that I used to play.

I have never found it necessary when I have lost $250 on a horse race or
a match of any kind to go home and inform Mrs. Anson that owing to my
bad judgment I had lost $2.50, but on the contrary I have made it a
point to tell her the truth at all times, so that she knows just as well
how I stand to-day as I do myself.

She and I are not only husband and wife in the truest sense of the word,
but we are boon companions as well, and I always enjoy myself better on
a trip when Mrs. Anson accompanies me that I do if I am alone.

I am as proud of my daughters as any man can well be and my only desire
is that they shall all be as good as their mother and make the husbands
of their choice as good and true wives.

At the present writing the only one of my birds that has left its parent
nest and started out to build a home of its own is in Baltimore, where
her husband, as fine a fellow as any man could wish to have for a
son-in-law, is at present engaged in superintending the putting up of an
office building contracted for the George H. Fuller Co., of Chicago, in
whose employ he is.

CHAPTER XII. WITH THE NATIONAL LEAGUE.

It was some time in the fall of 1875 and while the National League was
still in embryo that I first