"You didn't win but I'm proud of you all," said Coach Howard, slapping the jaded players on the back as they came through the door. "You were up against a better team, fifty per cent. better."
"Here, Bostwick," he added a minute later to the captain, who, sunk in gloom and with hanging head, was pulling off his wet football clothes, "cheer up. We can't always win. The main business is that you and your team played a magnificent up-hill game. I'm satisfied and Yale will be satisfied for you gave the best in you. That's always the test. You'll have another chance next year."
CHAPTER VII. A WRECK AT THE HARBOR.
The excitement of football had passed like most things in college and out of it. The 'Varsity had triumphed over Princeton, and tied with Harvard in a stirring, up-hill game, and now the students had settled down to the ordinary routine. While it was late in November, the fall had been such an open one that the crews, eager to get every day of practice possible, stuck to their work in the harbor. Codfish held manfully onto the job of coxswain in the Second Freshmen eight, the long-looked-for place on the First still eluding him. He was hopeful, however. "I'll get it before the rowing stops, and if not then, when it starts in the spring," he boasted to his roommates. "Watch me."
This afternoon he was perched on the window seat, legs crossed, lolling back on the cushions, and tickling the guitar.
"For the love of Mike," cried Frank from his room, where he had gone to nab an elusive French irregular or two, "isn't that 'stoogent from Cadiz' ever going to graduate?"
"Why so peevish?" inquired the Codfish, keeping up his strumming and humming. "There are fourteen different keys, you know, Mr. Armstrong, and as you never know which one you're going to be caught in, I've got to be a Spanish student in every one of them. I only have ten more to fix in my retentive memory, so the agony will soon be through."
"How many have you circumvented?"