"Why, it wouldn't have mattered if you were playing, March," said Blair.
"For there's no harm in telling you now that we were depending on you
for half the punting. Remsen thinks you are fine and so do I. 'With
March to take half the punting off your hands,' said he one day, 'you'll
have plenty of time to run the team to the Queen's taste.' Why, we had
you running on the track there, so you would get your lungs filled out
and be able to run with the ball as well as kick it. If you were playing
we'd be all right. But as it is, there isn't a player there that can be
depended on to punt twenty yards if pushed. Some of 'em can't even catch
the ball if they happen to see the line breaking! St. Eustace is eight
pounds heavier in the line than we are, and three or four pounds heavier
back of it. So what will happen? Why, they'll get the ball and push us
right down the field with a lot of measly mass plays, and we won't be
able to kick and we won't be able to go through their line. And it's
dollars to doughnuts that we won't often get round their ends. It's a
hard outlook! Of course, if I can pass--" But there Blair stopped and
sighed dolefully. And Joel echoed the sigh.

The last few days before the event of the term came, and found the first
eleven in something approaching their old form. Blair continued to burn
the midnight oil and consume page after page of Greek and mathematics
and German, which, as he confided despondently to Digbee, he promptly
forgot the next moment. Remsen made up a certain amount of lost sleep,
and Whipple gained the confidence of the team. Joel studied hard, and
refound his old interest in lessons, and dreamed nightly of the Goodwin
scholarship. West, too, "put in some hard licks," as he phrased it, and
found himself climbing slowly up in the class scale. And so the day of
the game came round.

The night preceding it two things of interest happened: the eleven and
substitutes assembled in the gymnasium and listened to a talk by Remsen,
which was designed less for instruction than to take the boys' mind off
the morrow's game; and Wesley Blair took his examination in the four
neglected studies, and made very hard work of it, and finally crawled
off to a sleepless night, leaving the professors to make their
decision alone.

And as the chapel bell began to ring on Thanksgiving Day morning, Digbee
entered Blair's room, and finding that youth in a deep slumber, sighed,
wrote a few words on a sheet of p