hich we called the foot-ball field
became the arena in which I suffered martyrdom daily. I hated the game.
When I donned my padded toggery it was with the secret spirit I should
have felt in preparing for the rack, yet I played recklessly for the
_eclat_ it gave me. To-day I have an occasional reminder of those
struggles in a weak knee, which has a way of twisting unexpectedly and
causing excruciating pain, but I consider that these twinges are fair
payment for the pleasure with which I contemplated my picture years ago
in the Harlansburg _Sentinel_, showing me in my foot-ball clothes, poised
on a photographer's fence. The subject, the _Sentinel_ explained, was
Captain Malcolm of McGraw, who had made the winning touch-down in the
Thanksgiving-Day game with the Northern University of Pennsylvania. The
photographer's fence, you might think, was the summit of my career at
McGraw, reached as it was in my last year there. To the admiring eyes of
my fellows it was, but the McLaurins of Tuckapo and the Malcolms of Windy
Valley were above all a practical people and to them I am indebted for a
little common-sense, which told me that I could not play foot-ball all my
life, nor would the heavy bass voice, so effective in the glee club,
support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a
family. I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it
would rise when I dreamed of a home. That home was not a plain stone
farm-house, hidden among giant trees. My view had broadened. I dreamed
of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and a flat clipped lawn, with
a cement walk leading over it to an iron gate. I looked back with
affectionate contempt to the art I had known in my youth, to the Rogers
group, Lady Washington's ball, Lincoln and his cabinet, the lambrequin
and the worsted motto. On my walls there would be a Colosseum,
Rembrandt's portrait of himself, a smattering of Madonnas, a Winged
Victory, and a Venus de Milo. To preside with me over such a house, to
sit at the piano of an evening and play accompaniments while I sang
sentimental songs, to fly with me over the country in a side-bar buggy,
behind a fleet trotter, I thought only of Gladys Todd. She was
accomplished, highly trained, it seemed to me, in all the finer arts of
life. In our valley the women never rose above their petty household
problems. They could talk, but only of recipes and church affairs, and
if they left this narro