while most schoolboys were indulging in
their last nap.

But, by various means, they had learned just where the nuts grew most
plentifully that season; and quite a list of available places had
been tabulated: to the Guernsey Woods for blacks; plenty of shagbarks,
and some sheilbarks to be gathered over at the old Morton Place,
where no one had lived these seven years now; and they said the
chestnuts away up in that region miles beyond the mill-pond was
bearing a record crop this season, as if to make amends for lean
years a-plenty.

Scranton was one of the few places where the boys still yearned
after a goodly supply of freshly gathered nuts to carry them through
a long and severe winter. Somehow they vied with one another in the
gathering of the harvest of the woods, and often these outings yielded
considerable sport, besides being profitable to the nutters. On one
momentous occasion the boys had even discovered the hive of a colony
of wild bees, cut the tree down, fought the enraged denizens by means
of smoke and fire, and eventually carried home a wonderful stock of
dearly earned honey that would make the buckwheat cakes taste all
the sweeter that winter because of the multitude of swellings it
cost the proud possessors.

Hugh had been coaxed to join the party; not that he did not fully
enjoy such enterprises, but he had laid out another programme for that
afternoon. All through the morning these same lads had been hard at
work on the open field where Scranton played her baseball games, and
had such other gatherings as high-school fellows are addicted. Here
a fine new cinder path had been laid around the grounds, forming an
oval that measured just an eighth of a mile, to a fraction.

All through the livelong day on Saturdays, and in the afternoons during
weekdays, boys in strange-looking running costumes of various designs
could be seen diligently practicing at all manner of stunts, from
sprinting, leaping hurdles, engaging in the high jump, with the aid
of poles; throwing the hammer; and, in fact, every conceivable exercise
that would be apt to come under the head of a genuine athletic
tournament.

For, to tell the secret without any evasion, that was just what
Scranton designed to have inside of another week---a monster affair
that included entries from all other schools in the county, and which
already promised to be one of the greatest and most successful meets
ever held.

Hugh and his chums were ev