try run, as well as many other
victories and defeats, had pretty well instilled it in the Lakerim
minds that team-play is an all-important factor of success. But the
time came when there was no opportunity to use the hard-learned,
easily forgot lesson of team-work, and it was each man for himself,
and all for Lakerim and Kingston.

When the ground was soggy and mushy with the first footsteps of
spring, and it was not yet possible to practise to any extent out of
doors, the Kingston Athletic Association received from the athletic
association of the Troy Latin School a letter that was a curious
combination of blood-warming hospitality and blood-curdling challenge.
The Latin School, in other words, opened its heart and its gymnasium,
and warmly invited the Kingston athletes to come over and be eaten up
in a grand indoor carnival. Troy was not so far away that only a small
delegation could go. Almost every one from Kingston, particularly
those athletically inclined, took the train to Troy.

Most surprising of all it was to see the diminutive and bespectacled
History proudly joining the ranks of the strong ones. He was going to
Troy to display his microscopical muscles in that most wearing and
violent of all exercises--chess.

The Tri-State Interscholastic League, which encouraged the practice
of all imaginable digressions from school-books, had arranged for
a series of chess games between teams selected from the different
academies. The winners of these preliminary heats, if one can use so
calm a word for so exciting a game, were to meet at Troy and play for
the championship of the League.

If I should describe the hair-raising excitement of that chess
tournament, I am afraid that this book would be put down as entirely
too lively for young readers. So I will simply say once for all that,
owing to History's ability to look wiser than any one could possibly
be, and to spend so much time thinking of each move that his
deliberation affected his opponents' nerves, and owing to the fact
that he could so thoroughly map out future moves on the inside of his
large skull, and that there was something awe-inspiring about
his general look of being a wizard in boys' clothes, he won the
tournament--almost more by his looks than by his skill as a tactician.
The whole Academy, and especially the Lakerimmers, overwhelmed this
second Paul Morphy with congratulations, and felt proud of him; but
when he attempted to explain how he had wo