She held to a tie what was conceded to be the best team that Old Dominion had ever mustered; and Vanderbeck, the largest and, athletically considered, the strongest of them all, bested her only by the narrowest and closest of margins on Vanderbeck's own gridiron. It was one of the upsetting things that never can happen, but occasionally do, that Midsylvania should go straight through to Thanksgiving Day with a miraculous record of five victories, one tie and one defeat out of seven games played, and with not a man in the regular lineup seriously damaged. And yet not so miraculous either when you came to cast up causes to find results. Her men had steam and had speed and had strategy, which meant team-work; in fact, they had everything. Heaven alone knew where, within the space of one year they had got it, but they had it: that was the main point, the incontrovertible detail. You know the old saying: Home folks are always the last ones to appreciate us. More or less I think this must have been true of us as regards our own University's football outfit. Undoubtedly a lot had been written and said in cities farther south about it, before the _Evening Press_ and the other papers in town began fully to realise that Midsylvania was putting the town on the football map. But when we did realise it we gave her and her team front page space and sporting page space, and plenty of both. Before we had been content to bestow upon her a weekly column which one of the undergraduates turned in at space rates, and pretty poor space rates at that--departmental stuff, mostly dealing with faculty changes, and Greek letter society doings and campus gossip and such-like. Now though almost anything that anybody on the staff or off of it chose to grind out about the boys who wore the M on their sweater breasts found a warm welcome after it landed on the City Editor's desk. Local pride in local achievement had been roused and if anybody knows of anything stronger than local pride in a city of approximately a hundred and fifty thousand population, please tell me what it is. We covered the games that were played at home that year as fully as the limitations of a somewhat scanty staff permitted, and Ike Webb was detailed to travel with the squad when it played away from home. He sent back by telegraph, regardless of expense, stories on the games abroad, which were smeared all over the sheet under spread heads and signed as being “By Our Special Staff Correspondent.” They were good stories--Ike was not addicted to writing bad ones, ever--and they made circulation. There is no telling how many letters from subscribers came to the chief commending him for his journalistic enterprise. He ran a good many of them. The paper rode with the team on the crest of the popularity wave. Trust Devore for that. He had a sense for news-values which compensated and more than compensated for certain temperamental shortcomings as exhibited inside the plant.