"Don't you think you are too smart a chap, Larry, to waste your time playing base ball?"
"I am not going to waste much time playing, Tom. I know enough about base ball to know that a player doesn't last as a good player more than ten or twelve years. He is too young to play before he is seventeen years old, and he is done for and is dropped out by the time he is thirty. So if I had any notion of making ball-playing my calling in life, I should have that fact in view to warn me. Oh, no Tom, I am only making this a bridge to carry me over a hard place."
"That's good sense. I was afraid you were going off with the base ball fever, and so never be fit for anything else. That's what will become of some of those young kids over in town who don't think of anything, from morning till night, but base ball. I always thought you had more sense into you than most of the boys around here. You are older than your years, Larry," and the plain-speaking blacksmith looked admiringly in the young man's face, "older than your years."
"Older than your years." These words rang in Larry's ears as he swung himself lightly into his saddle and ambled down the river road to Sugar Grove.
The blacksmith looked after him and muttered to himself, "He is smart enough to be anything in the way of a lawyer that there is in these parts. And if he were to cast sheep's eyes on the Judge's daughter, or on anybody else's daughter, for that matter, I just believe he would win her in time. He's got such a taking way with him." And honest Thomas Armstrong resumed his work with a mild glow of pleasure stealing through him as he thought of Larry Boyne and his possibilities.
IN THE FIELD.