t I had indulged in, together with the self-evident truth that the
Lord had blessed me with a constitution that a young bull might envy,
had all conspired to make me a young giant in strength, and as a result
I was as full of animal spirits as is an unbroken thoroughbred colt, and
as impatient of restraint.

Good advice was, to a greater or less extent, thrown away upon me, and
if I had any trouble it rolled off from my broad shoulders as water from
a duck's back and left not a trace behind. In the language of the old
song, I was, "Good for any game at night, my boys," or day, either, for
that matter, and the pranks that I played and the scrapes that I got
into were, some of them, not of a very creditable nature, though they
were due more to exuberation than to any innate love of wrong-doing.

In any contest that required strength and skill I was always ready to
take a hand, and in these contests I was able to hold my own as a rule,
though now and then I got the worst of it, as was the case when I
entered the throwing match at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn in October,
1872. The entries were Hatfield and Boyd, of the Mutuals; George Wright
and Leonard, of the Bostons, and Fisler and myself, representing the
Athletics. The ball was thrown from a rope stretched between two stakes
driven into the ground one hundred and ten yards from the home-plate.
Each competitor was allowed three throws, and the rules governing the
contest required that the ball be dropped within two large bags placed
on a line with the home-plate and about sixty feet apart. Hatfield led
us all in each of his three trials, and on the last one he beat his own
record of 132 yards made at Cincinnati in 1868 by clearing 133 yards 1
foot and 7 1/2 inches. Leonard came next with 119 yards 1 foot 10
inches, Wright third with 117 yards 1 foot 1 inch, Boyd fourth with 115
yards 1 foot 7 inches, Fisler fifth with 112 yards 6 inches, while your
humble servant brought up the tail end of the procession with a throw of
110 yards and 6 inches, not a bad performance in itself, but lacking a
long ways of being good enough to get the money with.

Among the famous characters of which the Quaker City boasted in those
days was Prof. William McLean, or "Billy" McLean, as he was generally
called, an ex-prize fighter and a boxing teacher whose reputation for
skill with the padded mitts was second to no man's in the country. To
take boxing lessons from a professional who really