Excerpt
CHAPTER I A FENCE WITH A HISTORY
"The best day so far this spring, fellows!"
"It feels mighty much like baseball weather, for a fact, Otto!"
"True for you, K. K., though there's still just a little tang to this April air."
"What of that, Eli? The big leagues have opened shop all over the land, and the city papers are already full of baseball scores, and diamond lore. We ought to be getting busy ourselves in little old Scranton."
"Allandale High is practicing. Sandy Dowd and I saw a bunch of the boys out on their field after school yesterday, didn't we, Sandy?"
"That's right, we did. And I understand Belleville expects to put an extra hard-hitting nine in the game this season. They're still sore over the terrible drubbing Allandale gave them last summer."
"Since Scranton has now become a member of the Three-Town League, taking the place of Lawrence when that nine dropped out, seems to me we ought to lose no time if we expect to commence practicing. That same Allandale team swept the circuit, you remember, like a hurricane."
"We've plenty of good material, fellows, believe me, right here in Scranton High. And somehow I've got a hunch that we're going to make even mighty Allandale take a tumble before the season gets old."
"Don't boast too soon, Eli Griffin. That's a wee Yankee trick you must have inherited from your forebears."
"Easy for you to say that, Andy McGuffey. Why, you're a regular old pessimist, like all your canny Scotch ancestors were. You love to look at the world through smoked glasses. On my part, I prefer to use rose-colored ones, and expect the best sort of things to happen, even if I do get fooled lots of times."
A number of well-grown lads were perched in all sorts of grotesque attitudes along the top rail of the campus fence. That same fence of Scranton High was almost as famous, in its modest way, as the one at Yale known throughout the length and breadth of the whole land.
It had stood there, repaired at stated and frequent intervals, for at least two score of years. Hundreds upon hundreds of Scranton lads, long since grown to manhood, and many of them gone forth to take their appointed places in the busy marts of the world, kept a warm corner in their hearts for sacred memories of that dear old fence. Many a glorious campaign of sport or mischief had been talked over by a line of students perched along the flat rail at the summit of that same fence. More than one contemplated school mutiny had been hatched in excited whispers amidst those never-to-be-forgotten historic surroundings.
Why, when a few years back the unthinking and officious School Directors voted to have that fence demolished, simply because it seemed to be out of keeping with the grand new building that had been erected, a storm of angry protest arose from students and parents; while letters arrived from a score and more of eminent men who were proud to call Scranton their birthplace. So overwhelming was the flood, that a hurry call for an extra meeting of the Board went out, at which their former ill-advised decision was rescinded....