“No doubt he thinks we are a good crowd for his school to tie up with,” answered Sumner, with ready complacency. “I really believe those fellows would rather beat us than any other school, but that’s because they are jealous of us. We are only a private school, more than half of us little kids in knickerbockers, but we have the inside track in Harvard, and we’re on the top socially. They don’t like that.”
“It’s the little kids and getting into college so early that spoils our athletics,” remarked Talbot. “Newbury is a public endowed school with lots of big fellows who don’t go to college, and Trowbridge is a boarding-school in the country where the fellows have nothing to do but play games all day. We aren’t anything but a school building in town and a playground in Brookline.”
“And Adams’s,” put in Sumner.
Adams’s was the house of the instructor who lived at the athletic field. It contained a schoolroom for such boys as were condemned to prepare the next day’s lessons before they left the field in the afternoon, and quarters for a limited number of boarding pupils.
“Adams’s!” exclaimed Pete. “What good is that? A half-dozen little kids who play on the fourth or third, and a few older fellows whose parents are abroad or can’t stand them at home. There wasn’t a fellow there last year who did anything for the school.”
“There was Pitkin,” Sumner remarked. “He’d have made the second crew if he hadn’t caught the measles.”
“He might,” responded Talbot, in a tone which implied that he probably wouldn’t. “But what’s Pitkin, anyway?”
“Ben Tracy is going there next year,” went on Sumner, “and that cousin Louis of his who lives in Worcester, and some one from New Jersey. There may be some other new fellows.”
“The usual orphan asylum!” commented Talbot, savagely. “It’s four to one that none of ’em will be good for anything. You always see things about one hundred per cent better than they really are.”
“That’s not half so bad as seeing them one hundred per cent worse than they are, as you do, you old growler!” retorted his friend, with a laugh.