The feeling of foreboding spread like a cold contagion from the field to the press stand, affecting the newspaper men; and, becoming generally epidemic, it reached the spectators. That earlier lustiness was almost altogether lacking from the outbreak signalling the beginning of play. In the salvo there was nothing heartening. It appeared rather to be pitched in the tone of sympathetic consolation for a predestined and an impending catastrophe; and even the bark and roar of Midsylvania's yell, as all Midsylvania gave it,' seemed to have almost a hollow daunted sound to it. Where we sat we could sense this abatement of spirit with particular plainness; in fact, I rather think Major Stone was the only person there who did not sense it in its full effect and its full import. I am not going to spend overmuch space in describing the first half of that game; this was in the days when games were divided into halves, and not quartered up into periods. Anyhow, I have forgotten a good many of the details. The principal points are what stick out in my memory. I remember that on the toss of the coin Sangamon won and kicked off. It was Vretson--no less--who drove his talented punting toe into the pigskin. There was a sound as though some one had smote a taut bladder with a slapstick, and the ball soared upward and away, shrinking from the size of a watermelon to the size of a gourd, and from a gourd to a goose egg; and then it came whirling downward again, growing bigger as it dropped. Woolwine, our quarter, caught it and took a flying start off his shoe hobs. Fay and the other Sangamon end, whose name I have forgotten, were after him like a pair of coursing beagles after a doubling hare; and together they nailed him before he had gone twenty yards, and down he went, with Fay on top of him and What'shisname on top of Fay. When they dug the three of them out of their heap little Woolwine still had the ball under him. As the teams lined up, boring their heads forward to a common centre, billy-goat fashion, and Morehead, who was playing end, called out the signals, “Six--eight--twenty-eight--thirty-one”--or some such combination of figures--we caught the quaver in his voice. Ike Webb, sitting next to me, gave a little groan and laid down his pencil, and put his pessimistic face in his sheltering hands. “Listen to that tremolo note, will you?” he lamented from between his fingers. “Licked, by golly, before they start! They won't play to win, because they're scared to death already. They'll play to keep from being licked by too big a score, and that means they won't have a chance. Just you fellows watch and see if I'm not right. Ah-h! There she goes!”