I have often consoled myself since then with the reflection that had I come to Chicago to start my career in 1871, that career might have come to a sudden end right there and then, and all of my hopes for the future might have gone up in smoke, for the big fire that blotted out the city scattered the members of the Chicago Base Ball club far and wide and left many of them stranded, for the me being at least, on the sands of adversity. Shakespeare has said, "There is a Providence that shapes our ends rough hew them as we will," and it seems to me that the immortal Bard of Avon must have had my case in mind when he wrote that line, for I can see but little to complain about thus far in the treatment accorded me by Providence, though I am willing to admit that there was some pretty rough hewing to do before I was knocked into any shape at all. When I began playing ball at Rockford I was just at that age when, in my estimation, I knew a heap more than did the old man, and that idea had not been entirely knocked out of my head when I arrived in Philadelphia. The outdoor life that I had led when a youngster, the constant exercise that 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.