Stories for Boys

by Richard Harding Davis

“Fancy our giving two hundred dollars extra for those cups, and then having them go to Malvern!” groaned Mr. Clay.

The boys took the prizes without remark, and had the courtesy not to open the boxes in which the cups reposed on blue velvet until they were out of sight of the men who had lost them with such bad grace.

But when once they were on the road, with the wind whistling around their hats and the trees meeting over their heads and the sun smiling its congratulations as it sank for the night, they examined the cups, and Grace said he had never seen any handsomer.

It really seemed as if the ten miles was covered in as many minutes, and though dogs ran out and barked at them, and the people in the fields stared at them as if they thought they were crazy, and although Barnes insisted on driving over every stone he could find and almost upsetting them, they kept up their spirits and shouted and sang the whole way.

The engineer of the train that had taken them up saw the coach on his return trip bounding through the shady high road where it ran parallel with his track, and told the operator at Malvern that “those boys were coming back on top of a circus band-wagon.”

And the people of Malvern were ready to receive them, though they were still ignorant of the second victory. The young people lined the high road for a distance beyond the town, and the boys saw them from afar, seated on the fence-rails and in carts and wagons. The other members of the club saw the stage, also, for one of the boys had been up in a tree on the lookout for the last half-hour. And they waved the club colors and all the flags they had been able to get at such short notice; but it was not until three of the Big Four stood up on top of the coach at the risk of breaking their necks, and held up the cups and waved them around their heads until they flashed like mirrors, that the club really cheered. And when they saw that there were THREE cups they set up such a hurrah that the cows in the next field tore madly off in a stampede. That night everybody in town came to Dr. Merton’s with the village band and thronged the big lawn; and Merton made a speech in which he spoke very highly of Prior, and of the Big Four who had helped to save the day, and of Thatcher, but most of all of Grace.

Then Grace had to speak leaning on his crutches; and the band played and the college boys sang and everybody handled the prizes and admired them even to the champions’ satisfaction.

The next day Grace bade his new friends good by and went back to college, where his absence was attributed to his sprained ankle. He thought of the people of Malvern very often, of the twilight evenings spent on Dr. Merton’s lawn listening to the college boys’ singing, and talking to the girls of the Malvern Tennis Club, and of the glorious victory of his pupils and the friendliness and kindness of his hosts.

He knew he would never forget them, but he hardly thought they would long remember him.

But, two weeks later, the expressman brought a big box with a smaller black one inside of it; and within, resting on its blue velvet bed, was a facsimile of the prize-cup of the tri-club tournament. And it was marked, “To Charles Coleridge Grace. From the people of Malvern.”