a
professional game. Is it very different?"

"Absolutely. You ought to go to one. You can't really understand the
United States of America until you do."

"Are you serious? I'm afraid you're just joking with me."

"Not at all. Why, do you know that baseball is the most American thing
in America? And it's about the only wholly American thing, as we like
to think of America. There is only one other place besides the ball
ground where the spirit of genuine democracy shows itself, and that is
in politics. There you will find the high and low together--the judge
putting off his ermine and getting down from the bench elbow to elbow
with Tom Radigan, the East Side barkeep, when the Patrick J. O'Dowd
Association of the Eighty-eighth Assembly District gives its annual
outing or its ball. But that's not true democracy because it's very
largely selfish--inspired by the desire of votes. Now baseball--that's
different. Inspired by no desire but to see a good game--and for the
home team to win. Nowhere else in the world can you see democracy in
its fine flower--at its best. There you can see them all--judges and
dock rats, brokers and bricklayers, cotillion leaders and truck
drivers, historians and elevator starters, lawyers and the men they
keep out of jail, college boys, grocers, retired capitalists, and the
lady friends of the whole collection. You'll find them all there. Oh,
you ought to go to a game yourself. Then you'd understand."

It seemed to Miss Maitland that this Smith was a very unusual person.
And his enthusiasms were strangely contagious. Fire insurance, New
York, and now baseball, things in none of which had she ever felt more
than a flicker of interest, suddenly, seen through his eyes, assumed a
reality, a vital quality she had never dreamed they could possess. Was
it all the difference in point of view?

"It isn't because baseball in my opinion does more real good than all
the socialistic documents put out by high-browed agitators will ever
do," Smith was continuing, "that I go to it. Not at all. I go to it
because I like it, and because I like to yell."

"Do you yell?" asked Miss Maitland of Boston.

"You do--that is, I do," said Smith, tersely. "At all events, when
things go our way."

"And don't you think I would be likely to--yell?"

"Well, hardly, at first," the underwriter answered. "After a while,
probably. If you'd like to go and see, though, whether you'd yell or
not, I sh