Neale's play on the streets and in vacant lots with perfectly heterogeneous and casual little boys had given him quite enough of a vocabulary to understand the words of this song; and odds and ends of the older boys' talk overheard in the locker-room at Hadley made the spirit of it by no means unfamiliar. But this was the first time that either words or spirit had ever been more than one of the casual by-products of boy-life. What put it in the center of his attention now was his admiration of Don as the model of colorful, sophisticated life. Evidently this was a part of such life. Neale applied his mind therefore to the words and the spirit and learned to hum the air. That evening Father read another uneventful letter from Mother; then they sat in silence till, as father was filling his pipe, he remarked, as if it had just come into his mind, "Oh, I thought you ought to have a racket of your own, Neale. I got one. It's in the hall on the coat-rack." Neale bounded upstairs and carried his prize to his room. There was not only a Sears racket, but three Wright and Ditson balls, Spalding's "Tennis Guide," and a little pamphlet on "How to Play Lawn Tennis." Neale dropped into his Morris chair and devoured both books before going to bed. The hard protective husk of his little boyhood was so newly sloughed off, that his adolescence had as yet received scarcely a mark upon its new freshness to impression. Ready now, responsive with an inward quiver to a whole range of experience to which he had been blind and deaf before, he was catching up from the chance materials about him, the stuff with which to construct his new world. And here was material ready to his hand. The editor, an enthusiast, an idealist of sportsmanship had put a great deal in his little treatise beside his copious advice as to the proper grip on the racket and the laying out of a court. Without the slightest self-consciousness (because he had the not-to-be-imitated single-heartedness of the sincere devotee) he had charged every section of his treatise with the spirit of the game, the spirit of sport, not of border warfare. So matter-of-factly was this message conveyed that even the adolescent soul, half-crusader, half-Hun, did not guess that it was being preached to. The word "honor" was never mentioned, yet Neale understood perfectly the significance of what he read, under the caption "Tournaments:" "The committee should provide adequate linesmen, for while the contestants themselves can generally tell whether a ball is good or not, yet close decisions occur in every match and it is obviously unfair to force a player to penalize himself (as he naturally would feel bound to do) by giving his opponent the benefit of the doubt on all uncertain cases." He nodded approvingly over the phrase, "as he naturally would feel bound to do." It did not strike him as a new idea, but merely a clearer statement of something he had always felt was in the air about sports.