Part 2

I'm glad you're on the team, and for the next year or two I don't mind being the father of a star end, provided you keep it firmly fixed in your head that it's just as important to keep old Julius Cæsar from slipping around you for twenty-five yards, as it is to keep the Andover quarter from running back kicks.

After you go to work, if anyone refers to me as the father of an end, I'll feel like turning the factory over to the labor unions, because if there is anything that disgusts a live business man it's to see a young fellow in business trying to live on a former athletic reputation. Just you remember, son, that the letter on your sweater fades quickly; but the letters on a degree last through life.

I didn't care much for that part of your last letter where you said you were afraid you were not good enough to hold down a regular job on the team, and I want to go on record right now that if that's the way you feel about it you're dead right. No man ever succeeded without confidence in himself, and it don't hurt any to let others know you have it.

I don't mean boasting. I despise above all else a person who is in love. That is, with himself, but as yet I have never heard of a scientific organization of bushel raisers, so it won't do you a bit of harm to let a little of your light shine forth now and then.

And, Ted, go out on the field every day with the idea that you're better than the average as a football player, and when you get a kick in the ribs or have your wind knocked out, come up with a grin and go back at 'em harder than before.

Play to win, Ted, but play clean. Your coach doesn't tolerate dirty football, and I don't tolerate dirty business. Play nothing except football on the football field, do nothing except study in your class rooms, and when you go to work, work in business hours. If you stick to that prescription you'll come out with a pretty fair batting average at the end of your life.

You say that if you play in the Andover game you'll be up against an opponent who will out-weigh you fifteen pounds. Don't let that worry you. No less a person than the great Lanky Bob said, "The bigger they are the 'arder they fall." All through your life you will be running up against men who are bigger than you physically, mentally, and in a business way, so it's just as well to get used to the fact while you're young.

Your dreading your bigger opponent reminds me of something that happened to me when I was about your age.

In those days the Annual Cattle and Poultry Show held at Epping was quite the event of our social season, and the one thing all the people looked forward to, for months.

This particular year I had been saving my money a nickle here and a dime there, for your grandfather was determined none of his children should grow up to be spendthrifts, and would turn over in his grave if he knew the allowance I give you.

You needn't tell your Ma this, but in those days I was sweet on Alice Hopkins who was the belle of the town, and after much careful planning and skillful maneuvering had wrung an ironclad promise from her to let me escort her to the show, and I was pretty sure she would keep it, for somehow she got wind of the fact that I had all of $10 to spend which was considerably more than any of her other swains had managed to accumulate. My father loaned me his best buggy for the occasion, and I spent the entire afternoon before the great day washing and polishing it, and grooming our bay mare until she shone; and believe me, I was some punkins in my own estimation when I drove up to Alice's house the next morning and she rustled in beside me in a new pink dress.

As we rolled along the river road, the mist rising white from the marshes, the brilliant splashes of color on the sumac and maples, the autumn tang of the crisp September air, and Alice looking prettier each minute at my side, all made my thoughts turn toward a rosy future in which she and I would ride on and on. I was oblivious of the fact that my entire capital consisted of a spavined colt and the ten dollars in my pocket, and that I had about as much chance of gaining my parents' consent to marry, as a German has of being unanimously elected the first president of the League of Nations.

Alice, I found after I had hitched the horse to the rail in the maple grove inside the fair grounds, had no such vague ideas. She had the curiosity of a savage, the digestion of an ostrich, and the greed of a miser. At her prompting we drank pink lemonade, ate frankfurters at every booth, and saw all the side shows, from the bearded lady and the blue monkey to the wild man from Borneo and the marvel who could write with his toes. At times I protested feebly, as my supply of dollars dwindled, but Alice would pout prettily and guide me gently by the elbow to the ticket seller, and then almost before I knew it another quarter had been squandered.

At noon, I remembered the nice box of luncheon my mother had put up for us and which I left under the buggy seat, but Alice tossed her head and marched smack into the dining tent where a sloppy greasy meal was served at a dollar a plate.

I followed meekly, groaning inwardly, for all I had left was three dollars, but trying to console myself with the reflection that after all the candy and popcorn, and frankfurters, and pink lemonade, and with a regular country dinner besides, Alice couldn't eat much in the afternoon and my wallet would get a rest while we watched the races.

On our way over to the track, after dinner, I noticed a group of men and boys clustered about a placard which read, "Wrestling Tournament For Boys Under Eighteen." Now I was the champion wrestler of the village for I was big and strong for my age and quick as a cat, and when we drew near and I saw a prize of $10 was offered to the winner, I felt that there was a chance to retrieve my fallen fortunes and get the necessary wherewithal to feed Alice throughout the afternoon if her inclinations still ran in that direction.

The judges entered me in the second group, the winner of which was to wrestle the winner of the first group for the championship. The second group was composed of boys all of whom I had defeated, and all of whom promptly withdrew when I entered. Two contestants remained in the first group, a great hulking farm boy, Caleb Henry, whom I had beaten the only time we had ever met, but only after a severe struggle on my part, and a little undersized shrimp of a fellow who looked half scared to death and whom I was sure I could lick with one arm.

Hoping that by some miracle the little chap might win, for I had no hankering for a severe struggle with Caleb, I escorted Alice over to a seat beside the track and was overjoyed on my return to find my hopes had been fulfilled.

As I threw off my coat and advanced with overflowing confidence toward the little unknown, he looked smaller and more insignificant than ever, and my head was so filled with the thoughts of the heaps of ice cream I could buy for Alice with the $10 prize money that I grappled my antagonist carelessly, and the next minute was giving a very creditable imitation of a pinwheel as I flew through the air lighting on the back of my neck, the little fellow sitting on my chest and pinning my shoulders to the grass.

I spat out a mouthful of dirt and struggled to my feet. One of the legs of my Sunday pants was ripped clear to the knee, and one shirt sleeve was torn off. Again we grappled, and again I was thrown as quickly as before.

Sore with defeat, I pulled on my coat and limped away with the jeers of the crowd echoing in my ears. Alice was not where I had left her, and after a half an hour's search I found her in a booth eating ice cream with Jim Davis, a hated rival who promptly informed me she had promised to ride home with him.

Rats, you know, Ted, leave a ship under certain conditions. Yes, I got a licking from my father when I reached home for spoiling my Sunday suit. A corker it was, too, with a hickory branch.

Oh! I forgot to say the little fellow who threw me so hard was the Champion Lightweight of New England.

Your affectionate father,

WILLIAM SOULE.

LYNN, MASS., _October 26, 19--_

DEAR TED:

If you imagine I've been wringing tears out of my handkerchief, and wearing crepe on my hat since I got your last letter, you're as mistaken as the Kaiser was when he started out to lick the world.

To tell the truth, Ted, I had to wipe a number eleven smile off my face when I reached the part about the seniors making you moan like new mown hay.

From the way you have been strutting around Lynn the past few months, I rather expected there was something coming to you, so I wasn't surprised to learn you'd collected it, for things are so arranged in this world that people usually get what is due them, whether it's a million dollars or Charlestown.

Some persons claim hazing is brutal. Maybe some kinds are; but your handwriting seems pretty firm in your last letter, especially in the part where you ask for an extra $10, so I guess you have not suffered any great damage. Personally, I have always maintained that hazing, if not carried too far, is the greatest little head reducer on the market, and it doesn't cost a dollar a bottle, war tax extra, either.

Perhaps it is not in keeping with the lordly dignity of your advanced years, to furnish entertainment for your schoolmates by fighting five rounds with your shadow, or asking your girl to go to a dance over an imaginary telephone. You should remember, however, that your turn will come with the new boys next fall, and you've got a long time ahead in which to think up original stunts.

Every time hazing is mentioned it reminds me of Sammy Smead and the Brothers of Mystery. I can't remember ever having told you about the Brothers, or Sammy either, for that matter, and as I have a few minutes before starting for the 10:30 to Boston, here goes!

Sammy was the son of old Isaac Smead, sole owner of the Eureka Wooden Ware factory in Epping. As old Isaac could smell a dollar farther than a buzzard can a dead cow, and as he had in early life developed a habit of collecting farm mortgages, which in those days were about as easy to pay off as the national debt of Germany, he waxed sleek and prospered mightily, until at the time about which I write, he was not only Epping's wealthiest resident, but also a selectman, pillar in the Second Church, president of the bank, and general grand high mogul of everything.

Sammy was the old man's only child, and knew it. He wore velvet pants: and patent leather shoes in the summer when all the other boys were barefooted; but his most heinous crime as I remembered it, was the round white starched collar he used to wear over the collar of his jacket.

Sammy's mother did what she could to spoil him. At that she didn't have to put in any overtime, for he was about as willing a subject, as could possibly have been found.

Those were the days, when any quantity of fraternal societies were coming into existence, and as Epping was a town where not more than five persons ever agreed on any one subject, it was a mighty good territory for new lodges.

Naturally, with all the men joining the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Clodhoppers, and the order of Husbandmen, and the women scrambling over each other in a bargain counter rush to be charter members of the Sisters of Ceres, we boys thought we had something coming to us in the way of a secret society, so we gathered in Fatty Ferguson's barn one afternoon, and banded ourselves into the Brothers of Mystery. Fatty Ferguson being the proud possessor of a discarded uniform once worn by a member of the Epping Cornet Band, was elected Grand Exalted Ruler, and I was made Keeper of the Sacred Seal, although my chance of doing business, depended on our improbable capture of such an animal, which we planned to keep in Fred Allen's duck pond.

The editor of the Epping Bugle printed some red silk badges for us to pin on our coats, and the Brothers were ready. At first, we attracted considerable attention at school by our badges, elaborate handclasps, and whispered passwords whenever two of the Brothers chanced to meet. As all the boys in our neighbourhood were members, with the exception of Sammy Smead, the novelty soon passed.

Now Sammy had everything we boys had, and a good many things we hadn't, but like everyone else in the world, he wanted what he hadn't which at that particular time, was a full-fledged membership in the Brothers.

Sammy, needless to say, had not been excluded from our select circle by chance, and it is doubtful if he would ever have become a member, if his mother, who was High Priestess of the Sisters of Ceres, had not found out that her darling had been left out in the cold.

She straightway called upon my mother, who having designs on an office on the Executive Board of the Sisters, passed the word along to me that if I wanted a new sled for Christmas, it would be well to see that Sammy was made a Brother.

Sammy being about as popular with the Brothers as sulphur and molasses, I was howled down when I proposed his name at a meeting, until I had a happy thought, that as all the Brothers were charter members, we had had no initiations.

The idea of initiating Sammy, instantly became tremendously popular, and he was duly informed that he had been elected a member, and was told to report at our barn at three o'clock the next afternoon.

Did Sammy show up? He did, velvet pants, patent leather shoes, white collar and all. Only a circus could have kept him away.

We blindfolded him, and put him through a course of sprouts in the barn, including making him ride a pig bareback around the floor, and walk the plank which was a beam above the hay mow, and to which he hung like a cat, squalling and whimpering, until Skinny Mason stepped on his fingers and made him let go.

Having exhausted the resources of the barn, we marched him out into the yard planning to hang him by the heels from a tree, when to our delight we discovered a two-wheeled iron barrel of tar, which the workman who had been mending our driveway, had left uncovered when he knocked off for the day.

Instinctively, we marched Sammy up to the tar barrel, and I liberally daubed his hateful and, wonderful to relate, still clean collar with its contents, taking more pains to get it on his collar, than to keep it off his clothes. It was hard work, for the tar was lukewarm and naturally heavy; but I was making a pretty good job of it, when I heard Fred Allen yell, "Look Out!"

I turned just in time, and saw charging full tilt across the yard my old billy goat. The Brothers scattered in all directions, but Sammy who was blindfolded and did not sense his danger, stood patiently waiting his fate. Billy struck him squarely amidships, and Sammy leaving his feet, described a beautiful curve in the air, and landed head first in the tar barrel, just as his mother, who had been visiting my mother, stepped out on the porch to see how her darling was enjoying himself with his little playmates.

I only mentioned Sammy, to show you that you got off easy. The next time you are called upon to perform, do whatever is asked willingly. There's no fun in making a person do what he wants to do, and if you show no great indignation at doing a few tricks, you'll soon be let alone. Don't try to be funny, if you succeed you will have to give encores, and I take it that is not what you are after.

Your affectionate father,

WILLIAM SOULE.

P. S. I did not get a sled; but I did saw three cords of wood, stove length.

LYNN, MASS., _October 30, 19--_

DEAR TED:

Somehow the price of cut soles is worrying me more, just now, than the fact that you have not been elected to one of the school clubs.

I realize that your not making one of the school clubs yet, is a terrible tragedy in your young life; but I feel as though you are going to survive, and perhaps you will be elected to one after all. I've found it a pretty good rule, not to figure a shipment of shoes a total loss even when the jobber writes that he's returning them, and if I were you I wouldn't borrow trouble until it's necessary. Trouble is the easiest thing in the world to borrow, and about the hardest to discount at the bank.

Maybe it's just as well you are having your touch of society chills and fever young, for it may save you from making a bigger fool of yourself later on. No one minds a young fool much, but an old one is about as sad an object as a Louisville distiller attending a Supreme Court decision on the prohibition law.

Society is all right, some of it; but just because you eat dessert at the end of your dinner, is no reason why you should make a meal of it. A little society, like the colic, goes a long way, and you want to remember that a man, like a piece of sole leather, usually figures out to what he is.

Burns, not Frankie the lightweight, but Bobbie who used to edit the Edinborough Daily Blade, back in the days when freshmen wore whiskers and plug hats, hit the nail on the head when he said, "A man's a man, for a' that."

I'll never forget when Aunt Carrie caught the society fever, nor will she. It was a couple of years before I was married, and it didn't make me want to postpone having a home of my own, although it did influence me to choose a girl who was society proof.

After your Grandmother Soule died, Carrie ran our old house and was doing a pretty good job of it, until Algernon Smiley came to Epping as principal of the grammar school. Algernon wore spectacles, a lisp, and long hair, and he could spout more poetry than a gusher well can oil. At that, he was a harmless sort of insect, if the girls of the town hadn't taken him seriously.

Algernon was a graduate of Harvard, and the only thing I ever had against that university. It didn't take him long to discover there was no real society in Epping, and not being at all backward about coming forward when he had anything to say, Carrie and her girl friends soon had the same idea. Now Epping had staggered along over two hundred years without the help of society, and was doing quite well thank you, with its church sociables, bean suppers, and candy pulls, until Algy butted in.

Everything we did was all wrong. "There was no culture," and having the hearty backing of all the girls he set out to culturate us. His first offense was a series of lectures, but after the young men had listened to him rave about the art of Early Egyptian Dancing, and the history of Nothing before Something, they unanimously had previous engagements when Algy sprang a lecture.

Next Algernon started a Browning Club, which consisted, so near as I could judge, in his reading a poem, and then everyone in the club expressing a different opinion as to what the poem meant. It may be good business for a poet to write a poem no one can understand, but believe me when I buy a rhyme for a street car ad it's got to be one every woman will recognize as advertising "The Princess Shoe."

To get back to Algy, after a while the attendance at the Browning clubs began to get mighty poor, and he had to think up a new scheme to keep the town from getting decultured. Somehow, the little cuss had scraped an acquaintance with some pretty solid men on the Harvard faculty, and he managed to drag several of them up to Epping to deliver lectures, with the result that the culture business began to show a healthy growth. Epping was not stupid, it had been bored.

Now while Algy had been trying to culturate Epping, he'd worn considerable horsehair off the sofa in Farmer Boggs' parlor, sitting up nights with his daughter Ruby. Ruby was a nice cow-like girl, who hadn't much to say and proved it when she talked, and as Algy was never so happy as when he was doing all the talking, he got along with her fine. Then, too, Pa Boggs owned free and clear the best farm in the township, and had $15,000 salted away in Boston and Maine stock, and Algy, for all his culture, wasn't overlooking any bets like those.

Where Algy went wrong, was in patronizing people he thought didn't know as much as he. Whenever old man Boggs juggled beans with his knife, Algy would smile upon him so condescendingly the old man would almost bust with rage; and when Mrs. Boggs said "hain't" he would raise his eyes as though calling upon heaven to forgive her; but what blew the lid off came at a Browning Club meeting that Carrie had insisted upon having at our house.

Algy imported a noted Professor to give a talk on Prehistoric Fish, and when the great man had finished, we all stood around, the girls telling him how much they enjoyed it, and the men wishing he would go, so they could retire to the kitchen and shirt sleeves. Poor Ruby, during a lull in the general conversation, started the old chestnut about Ben Perkins the light keeper at Kittery falling down the light house stairs, ending with, "and you know he had a basket of eggs in one hand, a pitcher of milk in the other, and when he reached the bottom they had turned into an omelette. Ain't spinal stairs awful?"

At the word "spinal" the Professor snickered, and Algy who was always nasty when Ruby made a break, said, "I'm surprised at your ignorance Ruby: you mean spiral."

Ruby began to cry, and everyone looked uncomfortable. I was hopping mad. I guess maybe it was the tight patent leather shoes I had on. Anyway I'd seen about enough of Algy.

"Shut up, you Goat," I snapped at him. "Haven't you brains enough to know she meant the back stairs!"

Algy claimed he was insulted.

I allowed it wasn't possible.

Then he said he was a fool to have tried to culturize Epping.

I said I reckoned his allowing he was a fool, made it unanimous, and invited him out in the yard to settle things, although I never could have hit him, if he had accepted my invitation.

In two weeks Algy left town, and the next fall Ruby married Will Hayes over at George's Mills, and has been happy ever since.

Ted, I wouldn't think too much about those clubs. There's no use worrying about what people think of you; probably they don't. You've only been at Exeter a few weeks, so if I were you I wouldn't jump into the river yet. Now I'll admit it will please me if you are elected to a club, but if you aren't, I'm not going to go around with my head bowed in shame, and neither are you, for ten years from now, no one will be greatly interested whether you belonged to the Belta Pelts or the Plata Dates, and above all things don't toady. Eating dirt never got anyone anything. Look at Russia.

Your affectionate father,

WILLIAM SOULE.

LYNN, MASS., _November 6, 19--_

DEAR TED:

I'm glad you've been elected to the Plata Dates, if for no other reason than because now that you have stopped worrying whether you would be, you will have time to worry about your studies. Don't you fool yourself that because E stood for excellent at the high school, I don't know that it stands for Execrable at Exeter. Now you are on the football team, it's better to have an E on your sweater, than on your report.

I thought when you were elected to the Plata Dates, you would be bubbling over with joy, but your letters are about as cheerful as a hearse. The teachers are picking on you, the football coach doesn't recognize your ability, and even the seniors so far ignore your presence, by failing to remove their hats and step into the gutter when you come along.