She threw back her head and laughed, "Oh, you needn't explain. I know you play. I'm a regular fan. I haven't missed a home game in three years, and I read the athletic news. McAlpine graduates, so does Johnstone. There's nobody left at Columbia who can punt. So you're to learn! More power to you. I'll come and root for you next autumn." He took, with him to West Adams a mental picture of a strong, capable body in a shirt-waist and golf-skirt, fluffy yellow hair, smiling lips, laughing, honest, blue eyes. He carried also what was more tangible and important in his summer plans, a worn brown football, the center of many an afternoon's battle between scrub and Varsity. As soon as he was installed at West Adams he went to work. The spare, thin grass on the upper meadow had been cut. There, a good mile Neale jogged every day, and there, all the morning, he practised punting: booting the ball high and far, racing down, trying to get to it while it was still bounding; then kicking it back again, experimenting with different ways of holding it. He always kicked at some target. "I'll drop that on the stone pile," he would say to himself, and before he kicked again, he would try to analyze success and failures. He no longer needed an Atkins to spur him to use his brains. By eleven o'clock, pretty well fagged-out, he would jog down again, take a plunge in the inlet above the mill pond, where no one could see him for the thick growth of alders, and come in to luncheon at noon, cool and ravenous. In the afternoon he worked at the mill, or lay round and read. He had brought a lot of books up from college in his trunk, but nothing seemed to fit his present serious regime as well as Emerson. After much running after false prophets the clear, brutal sanity of the Essays was as refreshing and tonic as the plunge into the icy, clear water of the inlet. He found in them too, what had escaped him at the first reading, an austere sonority in the best passages. "Let those fear who will. The soul is in her native realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn. They are not for her who putteth on her coronation robe and goeth out through universal love to universal power." He rolled it under his tongue. It beat about his ears like the low, dignified threat of distant thunder. One Saturday in August, a little before his twentieth birthday, something happened which cast a long ray of light back on Neale's life. It began by the great surprise of seeing Father and Mother drive up to the house in a buggy from the village livery-stable.