orders of his
superior officer. It is the easiest thing in the world for an umpire
to make a mistake, but he will be far less likely to correct his
errors if nine angry boys are all talking to him at once than if your
captain quietly goes to him with the rules or the facts behind him
and states the case. It is an old saying but none the less true that
"oil catches more flies than vinegar."

A boy who has developed a healthy interest in baseball while young
will probably never lose it in after life even though his
opportunities to play or even to see a game are few. I once met a
mining man in the interior of Mexico, a hundred miles from a railroad
and in a town where only three people spoke the English language, and
this man had not been to his home town in ten years, but he had
followed his baseball team through the papers all those years and
could tell you more about the players than many a man living in the
town where the team played.

Such a man is what the newspapers call a "fan," which is an
abbreviation of the word "fanatic." There is no harm in being a
baseball enthusiast, provided that we do not allow it to interfere
with our work or allow our desire to witness games to take the place
of systematic exercise for ourselves.

XVI

HOW TO PLAY FOOTBALL

The various positions and how to select men for them--Team, work and
signals--The rules

Football is usually played in the fall of the year because the
exercise that it involves is so violent that to attempt it at any
other time would probably result in injury to the players. The cool,
frosty days of October and November make baseball out of season, and
such weather is ideal for football.

So much has been said and written about the dangers of football as a
sport that many parents have strong objections to permitting their
sons to play. There is no question that it is a hard game and not
suited to weaklings, but a strong, healthy boy can play football under
proper conditions and with proper training quite as safely as he can
do many other things to which parents raise no objections, such as
wrestling, climbing trees, playing hockey, or even performing
difficult feats of gymnastics or acrobatics in a gymnasium. Every
year there are a number of serious accidents from football, but there
are also injuries from other games, and people are injured who play no
games at all, so it simply is a question whether we are willing to
take the chances of a sprai