Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Football stories; School sports -- Juvenile fiction; Teenage boys -- Juvenile fiction
“I hadn’t the ghost of a chance, Clif, and I knew it the second day
of practice. I can play football pretty well, but I haven’t had the
experience fellows like Dave Lothrop and Billy Desmond and Pete Jensen
and a lot more have had. And, of course, I’m light. No, sir, I’m
satisfied to be here, old son. Besides, I’m going to get a lot of fun
out of showing some of those First Team swelled-heads that they don’t
know all the football there is, as good as they may be! Heck, I’m not
kicking!”
And neither was Clif. In fact, after listening to Mr. Babcock’s talk to
them on the old wooden baseball grand stand that had been moved aside
to make room for the gridiron, he had begun to wonder whether being a
member of so glorious a company as the Scrub wasn’t a far better thing
than belonging to the First Team! Of course common sense told him
later that it wasn’t, but Mr. Babcock had almost made it seem so for
the moment!
“Cocky” seemed to have left behind him in the gymnasium some of the
brusqueness that awed his classes. To-day he acted and looked and
spoke like a “regular fellow.” He had on a pair of old canvas football
pants, a faded red sweater and two of the most disreputable gray
woolen stockings ever seen out of a rag bag. Those stockings had been
frequently and variously darned until there remained but very little
of the original material; and despite all the mending they still cried
out for help. “Cocky’s” sturdy calves were visible in wide areas in
more places than one! “Cocky” wasn’t a handsome man, for his face
was too square, his nose too blunt and his eyebrows too heavy. To be
frank, Mr. Henry Babcock, B.A., looked rather like a retired gentleman
pugilist; or, perhaps, like one’s idea of such a person. He was about
thirty years old, affected very loose tweed suits and, between the
hours of five and six, behind the closed door of Number 19 East Hall,
played weird melodies on an English horn. Any one who has ever heard an
English horn engaged in rendering a solo will understand why the door
was closed!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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