roduces a
strange looking, leather-cased bladder out of a trunk where Mother
hasn't discovered it and blows it up out on the front porch under the
youngster's inquisitive eye and tucks in the neck and laces it up.

"What is it, Pop? What you going to do with it?"

"That's what men call a football, Son. And right now I'm going to _kick_
it." And kick it he does--all around the lot--until after a particularly
good lift he chuckles to himself, the old war horse, and with the smell
of ancient battles in his nostrils sits down to give the boy his first
lesson in the manliest and best game on earth. And this first lesson is
tackling. Perhaps the picture on the opposite page will remind you of
the time you taught _your_ boys the good old game.

This particular kind of football instinct has produced many of the
finest players the colleges have ever seen. In a real football family
there isn't much bluffing as to what you can do nor are there many
excuses for a fumble or a missed tackle. With your big brothers' ears
open and their tongues ready with a caustic remark, it doesn't need
"Pop's" keen eye to keep you within the realms of truth as to the length
of your run or why you missed that catch.

Quite often, as it happens, "Pop" is thinking of a certain big game he
once played in and remembering a play--Ah! if only he could forget that
play!--in which he fumbled and missed the chance of a life-time. Like
some inexorable motion picture film that refuses to throw anything but
one fatal scene on the screen, his recollections make the actors take
their well-remembered positions and the play begins. For the thousandth
time he gnashes his teeth as he sees the ball slip from his grasp.
"Dog-gone it," he mutters, "if my boy doesn't do better in the big game
than _I_ did, I'll whale the hide off him!"

Strangely enough not all brothers of a football family follow one
another to the same college, and there have been several cases where
brother played against brother. But for the only son of a great player
to go anywhere else than to his father's college would be rank heresy. I
daresay even the other college wouldn't like it.

[Illustration: JUST BOYS]

Of famous fathers whose football instinct descended without dilution
into their sons perhaps the easiest remembered have been Walter Camp,
who captained the Elis in '78 and '79 and whose son, Walter, Jr., played
fullback in 1911--Alfred T. Baker, one of the Princeton backs in '83,
a