e youth of the High School at
Lakerim organized themselves into an athletic club that won many
victories, and how they begged, borrowed, and earned enough money to
build themselves a club-house after a year of hard work and harder
play.

Well, now, after they had gone to all this trouble and all this
expense, and had enjoyed the fruits of their labors barely a year, lo
and behold, one third of the Dozen were planning to desert the club,
leave the town, and take their good muscles to another town, where
there was an academy! The worst of it was that this academy was the
very one that had worked hardest to keep the Lakerim Athletic
Club from being admitted into the league known as the Tri-State
Interscholastic.

And now that the Lakerim Club had forced its way into the League, and
had won the pennant the very first year, it seemed hard that some of
the most valuable of the Lakerimmers should even consider joining
forces with a rival. The president of the club himself was one of
the deserters; and the rest of the Dozen grew very bitter, and the
arguments often reached a point where it needed only one word more to
bring on a scrimmage--a scrimmage that would make a lively football
game seem tame by comparison.

And now the president, or "Tug," as he was always called, had been
baited long enough. He rose to his feet and proceeded to deliver an
oration with all the fervor of a Fourth-of-July orator making the
eagle scream.

"I want you fellows to understand once for all," he cried, "that
no one loves the Lakerim Athletic Club more than I do, or is more
patriotic toward it. But now that I have graduated from the High
School, I can't consider that I know everything that is to be known.
There are one or two things to learn yet, and I intend to go to a
preparatory school, and then through college; and the best thing you
follows can do is to make your plans to do the same thing. Well, now,
seeing that my mind is made up to go to college, and seeing that
I've got to go to some preparatory school, and seeing there is no
preparatory school in Lakerim, and seeing that I have therefore got
to go to some other town, and seeing that at Kingston there is a fine
preparatory school, and seeing that I want to have some sort of a show
in athletics, and seeing that the Athletic Association of the Kingston
Academy has been kind enough to specially invite three of us fellows
to go there--why, seeing all this, I don't see that there is any