When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

“Who is Spunk Carey? Oh, Johnny, what outlandish names you boys do rake up!” exclaimed mother.

“Why, he’s Frank Carey the hardware man’s boy,” explained father, indulgently. “What’s his first name, John?”

CHUB THORNBURY

“I dunno,” you hurriedly owned; “Spunk” had been quite sufficient for all purposes. “But we’re goin’ to play in the vacant lot next to Carey’s house. There’s a dandy diamond.”

So there was. The Carey side fence supplied a fine back-stop, and thence the grounds extended in a superb level of dusty green, broken by burdock clumps and interspersed with tin cans. The lot was bounded on the east by the Carey fence, on the south and west by a high walk, and on the north by the alley. It was a corner lot, which made it the more spacious.

The diamond itself had been laid out, in the beginning, with proportions accommodated to a pair of rocks that would answer for first and second base; a slab dropped where third ought to be, and another dropped for the home plate, finished the preliminary work, and thereafter scores of running feet, shod and unshod, had worn bare the lines, and the spots where stood pitcher, catcher, and batter.

A landscape architect might have passed criticism on the ensemble of the plat, and a surveyor might have taken exceptions to the configuration of the diamond, but who cared?

DOC KENNEDY