“My eyes! but I wish de boys could see me now,” said one of them, pride and happiness beaming from every feature of his face. “I guess this is old man Barnum’s box, for sure.”
Van Bibber sat in the back of the box. He didn’t mind how the people around them smiled. He felt himself very far above them, and in a position to do as many eccentric things as he pleased. And he found himself enjoying the show and the friendly interest his guests took in him, and in their fear lest he couldn’t see everything, or that he might miss what the clowns said.
He stopped the man who sold peanuts and candies, and distributed them lavishly. It was cheaper by far than a Delmonico supper, and he enjoyed seeing the half-famished way in which the young rascals fell upon the supplies and stowed them away. They were really very noisy and wildly excited, but he didn’t care. He never remembered having given anybody so much extreme pleasure before in his life.
When it was all over and the big spectacular show that had held them breathless had ended, he fought his way out to the waiting hansom, very well pleased with the night’s experience. But before he got away his guests crowded around him at the door, and one of them, who, as they had privately informed him, was no less distinguished an individual than the captain of Open Lots Baseball Club, of which they were all members, thanked him very civilly and asked him his name. He gave the captain his card with grave politeness and shook hands with all of them with equal solemnity, and then drove down town and had a solitary supper. On the whole, he concluded that though he had made nothing by it, he had not wasted the box, and he went to bed satisfied.
And two days later he received in a very dirty envelope the following epistle:
Dear Sir—At a meeting of the Open Lots Baseball Club it was voted, on account of your kindness, to change the name to the Courtland Van Bibber Baseball Club, which it is now, as a mark of our apreshun of your kindness. Truly yours,
Terence Fahey McGloin,
Capt. C. Van. B. B. B. C.
“So,” said Van Bibber, as he put the letter carefully away, “It pays to go out into the highways, after all.”
THE STORY OF A JOCKEY.
Young Charley Chadwick had been brought up on his father’s farm in New Jersey. The farm had been his father’s before his father died, and was still called Chadwick’s Meadows in his memory. It was a very small farm, and for the most part covered with clover and long, rich grass, that were good for pasturing, and nothing else. Charley was too young, and Mrs. Chadwick was too much of a housekeeper and not enough of a farmer’s wife, to make the most out of the farm, and so she let the meadows to the manager of the Cloverdale Stock Farm. This farm is only half a mile back from the Monmouth Park race track at Long Branch.