It was an impressive occasion when the Catalpa club started on their first pilgrimage. They had arranged a practice game with the Black Hawk Nine, of Sandy Key, in the central part of the State, to begin the season with. Other games were arranged for later work, but this match, which was partly for practice, and partly to test the material of the new nine, was felt to be one of the most important. From Sandy Key the Nine were to go to Bluford to play the famous "Zoo-zoo Nine," as they called themselves, of that city, and then they were to begin a struggle for the championship of Northern Illinois with the Red Stockings of Galena. How much depended on the result of the meeting of the Black Hawks and the Catalpas, you who have followed the career of a base ball nine can best reckon. In Catalpa, at least, the game would be watched with great, although distant, interest and absorption. Two or three of the more active promoters of the Base Ball scheme were to go down to Sandy Key, which is on the Illinois Central Railroad, to witness the struggle of their favorite champions with the strangers. The Black Hawks were renowned as fielders. They had acquired a reputation that inspired terror among the base ball players of the southern portion of the state; and when it was noised abroad that a new nine from Dean County, heretofore unknown in the Diamond Field, had actually challenged the Black Hawks, experienced amateurs and professional players made remarks about the assurance of the new men from the North that were not intended to be complimentary or encouraging. The Catalpas had adopted blue as their standard color, and a uniform of blue and white, with a pennant of white, edged and lettered with blue, carried the colors of the club into new and untried fields. Great was the enthusiasm of the townspeople when the club, packed into two big omnibuses, with their friends, finally departed for the railway station, which was on the outer and upper edge of the town. A vast number of sympathizing friends and well-wishers attended the party to the station, and those who remained in town watched with a certain impressiveness the coming train as it skirted North Catalpa, crossed the tall trestle work that spanned the river below the town and finally disappeared in the grove of trees near the depot.