For the newspaper fellows they rigged up elbowroom accommodations of bench and table against the base of the judges' kiosk. There we sat--Ike Webb and the Major and Gil Boyd, who was our sporting editor, and myself, all in a row--and there we had been sitting for nearly an hour before the time for starting. Ike Webb was to do the introduction and Gil Boyd the running account of the game, play by play. My job was to keep tab of incidents and local-colour stuff generally. But the old Major was there as a spectator merely. He certainly saw a sight. In that town we always measured multitudes by our Derby Day figures; yet even Derby Days did not often turn out a bigger crowd than the crowd that swarmed to the Downs that bright gusty December afternoon. The governor came down from the capital and most of the statehouse force came with him. There were excursions by rail in from out in the state, all of them mighty well patronised. As for the local attendance--well, so far as compiling a directory of the able-bodied adult white population and a fair sprinkling of the black was concerned, the enumerators could have simplified and expedited their task considerably by going up and down the aisles and jotting down the names as they went. They could have made a fairly complete census of our prominent families without straying beyond the confines of the reserved-seat section at the front, or fashionable, side of the grand stand. And if a single society girl in town was absent it was because her parents or her guardian kept her at home under lock and key. Before two o'clock, the slanting floor beneath the high-peaked red roof of the structure made you think of a big hanging garden, what with the faces and the figures of all those thousands packed in together, row after row of them, with the finery of the women standing out from the massed background in brighter patches of colour, and the little red pennons that the venders had peddled in the audience all dancing and swaying, like the petals of wind-blown flowers. That spectacle alone, viewed from our vantage place over across the race course, was worth the price of admission to anybody. Carrying the simile a bit farther, you might have likened two sections of space in the stand to hothouses where noise was being brought into bloom, by both artificial and natural means. One of these forcing beds of sound was where Midsylvania grouped herself--faculty and students and old graduates. The other, a smaller area, held the visitors from Sangamon, two hundred strong and more, who had come down three hundred miles by special train, to root for the challengers, bringing with them a brass band and their own glee club--or a good part of it, anyhow--and their own cheer leader.