Even before that eventful year he had carried off so many silver cups and highly ornamented racquets at the different tournaments all over the country, that his entering college was quite as important an event to the college as it was to Charles. His career was not marked by the winning of any scholarships, nor by any brazen prominence in the way of first honors; and though the president may have wondered at the frequency of his applications to attend funerals, marriages, and the family dentist, he was always careful to look the other way when he met him hurrying to the station with three racquets in one hand and a travelling bag in the other. Nor was he greatly surprised to read in the next morning’s paper that “this brought the winner of the last set and Charles Coleridge Grace together in the finals, which were won by Mr. Grace, 6-4, 6-4, 6-2.” It was near the end of the first term in Grace’s junior year, and at the time when the dates of tournaments and examinations were hopelessly clashing, that he received another of many invitations to attend an open tournament. This particular circular announced that the N. L. T. A. of the United States had given the Hilltown Tennis Club permission to hold on their own grounds a tournament for the championship of the State. Mr. Grace was cordially invited to participate, not only through the formal wording of the circular, but in a note of somewhat extravagant courtesy signed by the club’s secretary. Hilltown is a very pretty place, and some of its people are very wealthy. They see that it has good roads for their village-carts and landaus to roll over, and their Queen Anne cottages are distinctly ornamental to the surrounding landscape. They have also laid out and inclosed eight tennis-courts of both clay and turf, to suit every one’s taste, and have erected a club-house which is apparently fashioned after no one’s. Every year Hilltown invited the neighboring tennis-clubs of Malvern and Pineville to compete with them in an interclub tournament, and offered handsome prizes which were invariably won by representatives of Hilltown. But this year, owing chiefly to the energies of Mr. C. Percy Clay, the club’s enthusiastic secretary, Hilltown had been allowed to hold a tournament on its own tennis-ground for the double and single championship of the State. This honor necessitated the postponement of the annual tri-club meeting until ten days after the championship games had been played. The team who did the playing for the Hilltown club were two young men locally known as the Slade brothers. They were not popular, owing to their assuming an air of superiority over every one in the town, from their father down to C. Percy Clay. But as they had won every prize of which the tennis-club could boast, they of necessity enjoyed a prominence which their personal conduct alone could not have gained for them.