It was owing to her good counsel that I braced up in the days when she was my sweetheart, and it was to please her that I have staid braced up ever since, and am consequently still strong in mind and limb and as healthy a specimen of an athlete as you can find in a year's travel, albeit a little too heavy to run the bases still and play the game of ball that I used to play. I have never found it necessary when I have lost $250 on a horse race or a match of any kind to go home and inform Mrs. Anson that owing to my bad judgment I had lost $2.50, but on the contrary I have made it a point to tell her the truth at all times, so that she knows just as well how I stand to-day as I do myself. She and I are not only husband and wife in the truest sense of the word, but we are boon companions as well, and I always enjoy myself better on a trip when Mrs. Anson accompanies me that I do if I am alone. I am as proud of my daughters as any man can well be and my only desire is that they shall all be as good as their mother and make the husbands of their choice as good and true wives. At the present writing the only one of my birds that has left its parent nest and started out to build a home of its own is in Baltimore, where her husband, as fine a fellow as any man could wish to have for a son-in-law, is at present engaged in superintending the putting up of an office building contracted for the George H. Fuller Co., of Chicago, in whose employ he is. CHAPTER XII. WITH THE NATIONAL LEAGUE. It was some time in the fall of 1875 and while the National League was still in embryo that I first made the acquaintance of William A. Hulbert, who afterwards became famous as the founder of that organization and the man whose rugged honesty and clear-headed counsels made of base-ball the National Game in the truest and broadest sense of the word. At that time Mr. Hulbert was the President of the Chicago Base-Ball Club, and in company with A. G. Spalding he came to Philadelphia for the purpose of getting my signature to a contract to play in the Western metropolis. It was the ambition of the Chicago management to get together a championship team, and with that object in view they had already signed the big-four who had helped so many times to win the pennant for Boston, viz.: Cal McVey, first base; James White, catcher; Ross Barnes, second base; and A. G. Spalding, pitcher, and the latter, who was to captain the Chicago team, had suggested my engagement as third baseman. I finally agreed to play with the team at a salary of $2,000, or $200 more than I was then getting with the Athletics.