We did not
make much fuss about them, I agree, and consequently some boys may have
been allowed to grow to manhood without proper physical training; but
it seems to me that most of us were playing something in the fresh air
the greater portion of the time. However, I have always been a great
believer in manly sports and I wish to continue to be.
When my boy entered college I remember telling him kindly but
explicitly that it was a costly matter to send him there, and that I
should expect him to make the most of the opportunities for improvement
which were offered him. I knew that he was not especially clever at
his books like his brother David, yet at the same time I had set him
down as a sensible, wide-awake fellow with at least an average amount
of brains and with plenty of tact and common sense. It was my hope
that he would devote himself to political economy and mathematics, in
which case I should try and find an opening for him after graduation
with the firm of Leggatt & Paine, our leading bankers. I expected, of
course, that he would continue to take a suitable amount of exercise,
to keep himself in good trim; row on the river and not altogether
renounce base-ball. Indeed, although I was aware that collegiate
sports were a much more serious tax on a student's time than in my day,
I should not have seriously demurred had he been selected to row on the
University crew or play on the University base-ball nine.
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