“That’s all very good, and I can understand why baseball is so tempting to so many young men. But it lasts a short time, and then the player finds himself without any regular business. His fingers are banged out of shape; he has exercised so violently that more than likely his health is injured, and he is compelled to work like a common laborer to get a living. Ten years from now there will hardly be one of the present professionals in the business, I’m sure.”
“I guess you ain’t far from the fact, but for all that, if I had the chance that you have, I would be mighty glad to take in all the baseball sport I could.”
But Ben was sensible in this respect, and steadily refused to look upon himself as training for the professional ball field. In looking back to that time, I am rejoiced that such is the fact. There are many of my readers who recall the popular players of years ago—McBride, Wright, Fisler, Sensenderfer, McMullen, Start, Brainard, Gould, Leonard, Dean, Spalding, Sweeney, Radcliffe, McDonald, Addy, Pierce, and a score of others. Among them all I recall none still in the field. Some are dead, and the rest are so “used up” that they would make a sorry exhibition if placed on the ball field to-day.
Ben Mayberry was a swift and skillful skater, and in running there was not a boy in Damietta who could equal him. It was by giving heed to these forms of healthful exercise, and by avoiding liquor and tobacco, that he preserved his rosy cheeks, his clear eye, his vigorous brain, and his bounding health.
“Why, how do you do, Ben?”
The lad looked up from his desk in the office, one clear, autumn day, as he heard these words, and I did the same. There stood one of the loveliest little girls I ever looked upon. She seemed to be ten or eleven years of age, was richly dressed, with an exuberant mass of yellow hair falling over her shoulders. Her large, lustrous eyes were of a deep blue, her complexion as rich and pink as the lining of a sea shell, and her features as winsome as any that Phidias himself ever carved from Parian marble.
Ben rose in a hesitating way and walked toward her, uncertain, though he suspected her identity.
“Is this—no, it cannot be——”
“Yes; I am Dolly Willard, that you saved from drowning with my poor mamma last winter. I wrote you a letter soon after I got home, but you felt too important to notice it, I suppose.”
And the laughing girl reached her hand over the counter, while Ben shook it warmly, and said: