asons?
If I have been asked that question once I have been asked it a thousand
times. The public, as a rule, seem to think that because a man is a
professional ball player and therefore employed but seven months in the
year he must necessarily spend the other five in idleness, and there are
doubtless some few ball players that spend their winters in that way,
but, be it said to the credit of the craft, there are not many of them.
There is no man upon whose hands time hangs so heavily as it does upon
the hands of him who has nothing to do, at least that has been my
experience, and for that reason I have always managed to busy myself at
something during the winter months. Some of the things that I engaged in
proved profitable, others did not, but, all-in-all, the winter of 1885
yielded me the best results of my life, for that winter I spent in doing
what the old gentleman had wanted me to do years before, viz., in going
to school. I had a very good reason for doing this, as you can readily
see.

During my ball-playing career I had entrusted some money to the old
gentleman up in Marshalltown for safe keeping, and while up there on a
visit in the fall of 1884, needing some coin, I asked for it.

"Figure up how much I owe you, interest and all," was his reply, "and we
will have a settlement."

Now, the old gentleman might just as well have set me down at the foot
of the Rocky Mountains with a wheelbarrow and told me to carry them away
to the Atlantic coast on that vehicle, as to have asked me to do an
example in interest, and I was too ashamed of my ignorance to allow him
to know that such a thing was beyond my powers, so I managed to get
around the matter in some way, but I made up my mind then and there that
I would at the first opportunity learn at best enough to take care of my
own business. That winter I spent with my wife and daughter in
Philadelphia, and here I found that she had a brother, Remey A. Fiegel,
who was as averse to going to school as ever I had been. By this time I
had come to a realizing sense of the power of knowledge, and so I
labored with him until he consented to go to night-school, providing
that I would send him, which I agreed to do.

Pierce's Business College was the place selected, and when I went up
there to make the necessary arrangements for his tuition I asked how old
a man had to become before he was barred from attending.

"Oh!" replied the superintendent, "age is no bar here. We have