“Personally I do not. But, in his lifetime, I knew his gallant father well; in fact, intimately. For some months we served together on the staff of General Leonidas Polk. Accordingly I felt qualified by my personal acquaintance with his family to treat of the subject as I have treated it.” “Oh, I see!” Devore gave an involuntary smile quick burial in the palm of his cupped hand. “And so you've caught the fever too?” “Fever, sir? What fever?” “I mean you've got yourself all worked up about football, the same as everybody else in town?” “Not at all, sir. Of the game of football I know little or nothing. In my college days we concerned ourselves in our sportive hours with very different pursuits and recreations.” The Major, as we knew from hearing him tell about it a hundred times, had left the University of Virginia in his second year to enlist in the army. And we knew his views on the subject of sports. If a young person of the masculine gender could waltz with the ladies, and ride a horse well enough to follow the hounds without falling off at the jumps, and with a shotgun could kill half the birds he fired at--these, from the Major's standpoint, were accomplishments enough for any Southern gentleman, now that the use of duelling pistols had died out. We had heard him say so, often. “Football, considered as a game, does not interest me,” he went on now. “I have never seen it played. But on account of Mr. James Payne Morehead, Junior, I am interested. Being of the strain of blood that he is, I am constrained to believe he will acquit himself in a manner worthy of his ancestry, wheresoever he may be placed. In the article you have there before you I have said as much.” “So I notice,” said Devore, keeping most of the irony out of his tone. “Thank you, Major--we'll stick the yarn in to-morrow.” And then, as the old man started out: “By the way, Major Stone, if you've never seen a game you might enjoy seeing the one next Saturday--against Sangamon. It'll be your last chance this season. I'll save you out a press ticket--if you don't mind sitting in the newspaper box with the boys that I'll have out there covering the story?” “I am obliged to you, sir,” said Major Stone. “I shall be pleased to avail myself of the courtesy, and nothing could afford me more pleasure than to have the company of my youthful compatriots in the field of journalistic endeavour on that occasion.” He talked like that. Talking, he made you think of the way some people write in their letters, not of the way anybody else on earth spoke in ordinary conversation.