“What are they doing?” asked Wolcott, eagerly. Here was one of his father’s criticisms anticipated.
“Their part in the world,” Dr. Brayton answered. “Take the backfield of that Harvard team, for example. The full-back is head of an important city church; the right half-back is manager of one of the great Western copper mines; the other half is perhaps the cleverest surgeon of his age in Boston; one of the quarter-backs is professor at Columbia, and the substitute half is president of one of the largest publishing houses of the country. The team has been out of college considerably less than twenty years.”
“You don’t say anything about yourself,” said Wolcott, with complimentary naïveté.
Dr. Brayton laughed. “I belong to the second class—those who have been faithful in small things.”
“Have the Yale men done as well?” asked the young man.
“I don’t know so much about them. That man holding the ball is a full professor at Yale. The man at his left is governor of the Hawaiian Islands.”[[2]]
[2]. These records of Harvard and Yale ex-football players are taken from the teams of a certain year between 1885 and 1890—teams with which the author happens to be familiar. They are quoted not as remarkable, but as typical.
“I’m much obliged to you for telling me all this,” said Wolcott. “My father thinks football players are an inferior kind of men, who never will amount to anything, and I’m glad to know some facts that prove the contrary. I suppose I ought to introduce myself,” he added, his shyness suddenly recurring.