Now, I have received a great many letters concerning athletic matters in my time, but few more interesting than this. Concealed under a very matter-of-fact speech and manner, there is in me a vein of the imaginative which I occasionally indulge. Sometimes a very small matter will be enough to send me on a very wild flight. I remember that I read the letter with the black border again and again, trying to picture to myself the one who wrote it. There were nine sentences, and six of them beginning with the "I,"--evidently a woman of strong personality. "I am desirous," "It is my wish," certainly indicated one accustomed to have her inclinations respected. "He comes of a family renowned for strength and vigor, and should be able to surpass all competitors," plainly showed a woman proud of her birth, and ambitious for success. A Virginian, a Fairfax. I made a mind picture of her as she wrote the letter, sitting in a cool and shaded room in one of those white-pillared, wide-halled mansions, built a century ago among the oaks. She was dressed in black, her figure tall and slender, her back straight and her head well poised. Her hair had a few threads of white in it, but a hint of color still showed in her cheeks, and the light had not yet gone out of her dark eyes. Her mouth I pictured a trifle thin-lipped and positive. At an old mahogany desk with big brass escutcheons she sat, the magnolias' heavy fragrance in the air, the song of the darkies sounding faintly from the distant fields. This is the picture I made on that November morning, and how long I should have dreamed I cannot say, had not Paddy's voice from under my window waked me from my trance, with "Jerry, ye Kildare divil, luk at the rake ye lift out the night; it's half a mind I hev to comb yer thick hid wid it." Jerry protested his innocence in tones only less strident than Paddy's own, and the remarkably fluent and aggressive tirade of the latter was only lost to me when they had walked down the track and out of ear-shot. Now, I defy any one to make mind pictures under such conditions, and I became my practical self at once. I shut off the romantic stop with a thud, and turning on the business pipe, proceeded to answer my mail. Most of the circulars went into the waste basket; receipted bills into one compartment, unpaid into another. I answered a few of the routine letters, and then oddly enough I broke my rule, and took up the black-bordered letter again.