There was a time when I thought that it was the luxuries that made life worth living. That was in the old Bohemian days.

"Necessities!" I used to laugh, "Pooh! Who cares about necessities.

What if the dishpan does leak? It is the luxuries that count."

Bohemia and luxuries! Half a dozen lean, boarding-house years have steered me safely past that. After such a course in common sense you don't stand back and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a nest of purple bull-rushes, or complain because the bureau does not harmonize with the wall paper. Neither do you criticize the blue and saffron roses that form the rug pattern. 'Deedy not! Instead you warily punch the mattress to see if it is rock-stuffed, and you snoop into the clothes closet; you inquire the distance to the nearest bath room, and whether the payments are weekly or monthly, and if there is a baby in the room next door. Oh, there's nothing like living in a boarding-house for cultivating the materialistic side.

But I was to find that here at Knapf's things were quite different.

Not only was Ernest von Gerhard right in saying it was "very German, and very, very clean;" he recognized good copy when he saw it. Types!

I never dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German woodcuts that one sees illustrating time-yellowed books.

I had thought myself hardened to strange boarding-house dining rooms, with their batteries of cold, critical women's eyes. I had learned to walk unruffled in the face of the most carping, suspicious and the fishiest of these batteries. Therefore, on my first day at Knapf's, I went down to dinner in the evening, quite composed and secure in the knowledge that my collar was clean and that there was no flaw to find in the fit of my skirt in the back.

As I opened the door of my room I heard sounds as of a violent altercation in progress downstairs. I leaned over the balusters and listened. The sounds rose and fell, swelled and boomed. They were German sounds that started in the throat, gutturally, and spluttered their way up. They were sounds such as I had not heard since the night I was sent to cover a Socialist meeting in New York. I tip-toed down stairs, although I might have fallen down and landed with a thud without being heard. The din came from the direction of the dining-room. Well, come what might, I would not falter. After all, it could not be worse than the awful time when I had helped cover the teamsters' strike. I peered into the dining-room.

The thunder of conversation went on as before. But there was no blood shed. Nothing but men and women sitting at small tables, eating and talking. When I say eating and talking, I do not mean that those acts were carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and talking went on simultaneously, neither interrupting the other. A fork full of food and a mouthful of ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passed one another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated until Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my direction, twisted the discouraged mustaches into temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward a table in the center of the room.

Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it now I turn cold.

The battery was not that of women's eyes, but that of men's. And conversation ceased! The uproar and the booming of vowels was hushed.

The silence was appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what seemed to be millions of staring blue eyes were fixed on me. The stillness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Such men!

Immediately I dubbed them the aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with which to describe their foreheads.

It appeared that the aborigines were especially favored in that they were all placed at one long, untidy table at the head of the room. The rest of us sat at small tables. Later I learned that they were all engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in the most awe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke impossible German pipes and dozens of cigarettes. They have bulging, knobby foreheads and bristling pompadours, and some of the rawest of them wear wild-looking beards, and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew Fields never even dreamed of. They are all graduates of high-sounding foreign universities and are horribly learned and brilliant, but they are the worst mannered lot I ever saw.

In the silence that followed my entrance a red-cheeked maid approached me and asked what I would have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was not dinner served in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other and sniggered like fiendish little school-boys.

The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner was served in the middle of the day, naturlich. For supper there was Wienerschnitzel and kalter Aufschnitt, also Kartoffelsalat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.

The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled with a horrible desire to shriek and run. Instead I managed to mumble an order. The aborigines turned to one another inquiringly.

"Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she say?" Whereupon they fell to discussing my hair and teeth and eyes and complexion in German as crammed with adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was choking, with caraway. The entire table watched me with wide-eyed, unabashed interest while I ate, and I advanced by quick stages from red-faced confusion to purple mirth. It appeared that my presence was the ground for a heavy German joke in connection with the youngest of the aborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking aborigine with a doll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared and bristling pompadour and very small pig-eyes. The other aborigines clapped him on the back and roared:

"Ai Fritz! Jetzt brauchst du nicht zu weinen! Deine Lena war aber nicht so huebsch, eh?"

Later I learned that Fritz was the newest arrival and that since coming to this country he had been rather low in spirits in consequence of a certain flaxen-haired Lena whom he had left behind in the Fatherland.

An examination of the dining room and its other occupants served to keep my mind off the hateful long table. The dining room was a double one, the floor carpetless and clean. There was a little platform at one end with hardy-looking plants in pots near the windows. The wall was ornamented with very German pictures of very plump, bare-armed German girls being chucked under the chin by very dashing mustachioed German lieutenants. It was all very bare, and strange and foreign to my eyes and yet there was something bright and comfortable about it. I felt that I was going to like it, aborigines and all.

After my first letter home Norah wrote frantically, demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house. I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about this household, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau Knapf, whom I have never seen. Minna is inordinately fond of dress, and her remarks anent my own garments are apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especially when she intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiring adjectives directed at my blouse or hat. Thus:

"Wir haben roast beef, und sparribs mit sauerkraut, und schicken--ach wie schoen, Frau Orme! Aber ganz pracchtvoll?" Her eyes and hands are raised toward heaven.

"What's prachtful?" I ask, startled. "The chicken?"

"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"

I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist, and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"

I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly, and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish Norah could but see me in the act.

When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob. And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do you call them--jabots?"

GEORGE L. TEEPLE.

Mr. George L. Teeple was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1864, and at the age of nine came to Whitewater to live with his aunt and uncle. He was graduated from the old "Academic Department" of the Whitewater Normal, about which school he writes so charmingly in the sketch here given.

Mr. Teeple planned his collegiate career in preparation for the profession of engineering. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1889, and was engaged in active engineering work and instructural duties in this line until 1895. But at this time he felt the call to the field of English, and he gave special study to this subject for two years at Harvard.

From 1897 to 1899 he was instructor in English in the State Normal School at Stevens Point, but at this time the demands of his health made it necessary that he resume active outdoor work, so, since the latter date, he has been more or less closely identified with his first-chosen profession. But in all these years he has never lost his interest in creative literary activities. He writes very slowly and carefully, with infinite pains and almost endless revision. His work, as represented in "The Battle of Gray's Pasture," fully repays his effort, for, though the phrases seem to have come easily and readily, they show the fitness and grace that are the result of no other thing than rigorous care.

His home is in Whitewater, which, as will be noted, has sheltered many Wisconsin writers, notably President Albert Salisbury and Dr. Rollin Salisbury, George Steele and Julius Birge. The selection here given is an account of a real football battle. But "Gray's Pasture" has now been transformed into a modern athletic field, and the "spreading oak" has been replaced by a concrete grandstand.

THE BATTLE OF GRAY'S PASTURE

From the Century Magazine, September, 1903.

... You will find no such "Normalities" nowadays. The old breed is gone.

The greenest I see look quite correct and starched and tailor-made. No originality of costume now. No "high-water pants," such as refreshed the eye in the old days. No pitifully insufficient coat, stretching its seams across some great fellow's back, button struggling with buttonhole to hold in his expanding chest, showing by its very insufficiency what a Hercules he was. You will see none of these now.

They have disappeared; the old sap and individuality quite, quite gone.

There is no such spirit in the school today. They have a football eleven, it is true, and it holds its head well up among its mates; a little above 'em, too, most of the time; the old school's the old school yet, I tell 'em; but, after all, it isn't the old game, nor the old spirit. I go out sometimes to watch them, and think: "Well, it's a queer game they play now, and call football!" They trot out in such astonishing toggery; padded and guarded from shin to crown--welted, belted, strapped, and buckled beyond recognition. And there's no independence in the play; every move has to be told 'em. It's as if they weren't big enough to run alone; and so they hire a big stepmother of a university "coach," who stands around in a red sweater, and yells, and berates them. Not a man answers back; he doesn't dare to. They don't dare eat plain, Christian food, but have a "training table," and diet like invalids. I've seen 'em at a game not dare to take a plain drink of water; when they got thirsty they sucked at a wet sponge, like babes at the bottle!

It was not so in our day. No apron strings of a university coach were tied to us. We were free-born men. When we wanted to play we got together and went down to the old pasture, to the big oak tree that stood near the middle of it; and there we would "choose up," and take off our coats and vests and neckgear, and pile them round the oak, and walk out on the field and go at it--_everybody_--not a pitiful dozen or so, while the rest stood with their hands in their pockets and looked on--but _everybody_! And it was _football_: no playing half an hour without seeing the ball in the air once; we kicked it all the time--except when we missed it, and then we kicked the other fellow's shins! And when we got thirsty we went down to the spring and took an honest drink out of an honest tin cup.

And what a fine, free, open game it was--the old game! What art you could put into its punting, and running, and dodging, and creeping, and drop-kicking! And what a glorious tumult in the old-fashioned scrimmage, especially the scrimmages in the old ditch. It was a rather broad and shallow ditch, and into it the ball would often roll, a dozen excited fellows dashing after it; and there in the ditch bottom, in mad melee, frantic foot to foot, naked shin against sole leather, we would fight to drive the ball through the opposing mob. There might the rustic Normalite, with implacable cowhides, the bigger now the better, sweeten his humiliation with revenge, and well I remember the fearful devastation he sometimes wrought among our Academic shins!

But we were used to that. Indeed, we youngsters gloried in it. It was a spot upon your honor not to have a spot upon your shin. We compared them as soldiers brag of their wounds in battle, and he who could exhibit the largest and most lurid specimen was the best man. Those discolored patches were our "V. C.'s" and "Crosses of the Legion of Honor"; seals attesting our spirit, stamped with a stamp of good, stiff sole leather, painfully enough, it was true, but who cared for that? We were only sorry we could not exhibit them in public. To be obliged to carry such decorations under your trouser leg was hard.

Football Night at the "Lincolnian Literary," and Laury Thompson's speech there I must tell about. If any of the old boys ever read this--and it is for them I am writing it--they will wonder if I leave that out. For it marked an epoch in the Normal preparation for the game. And coming from Laury Thompson it was so unexpected. He always looked so cheerful in his high-water pants. His clothes were such a harmonious misfit. And he got off his absurdities with such a grave, humorous-innocent face; only the veiled twinkling in the eyes to show that it was not the most solemn matter in the world.

He "wore his pants high-water a-purpose," he told us; "had 'em made so for hot weather; coolin', ye know; refreshin'; lets the air in; breeze of heaven playin' up and down your pant-leg." And when one of the boys cracked some joke on his big shoes, he gravely remonstrated, assuring us that he "had those shoes made sort of _in memoriam_; hide of a heifer calf of his'n that got killed by the cars: a rosebud of a little critter; he kind o' wanted something to remember her by; tarnation good leather, too." He had "writ a poem" on that calf, he said, but refused to recite it; "felt delikit about exposin' his feelin's."

The old Lincolnian Literary Society is dead now, and its room has been turned into a shop for the Manual Training Department. It is a long, narrow room on the third floor, and was crowded that night to the very door. The meeting, called "to rouse public spirit in the matter of the coming game," grew spirited and hilarious as the speaking proceeded, and when Thompson was called on, and his tall, odd figure rose up in the midst, there was great thundering of boots along the floor.

"Boys," he began, "our Academic friends, raised, most of 'em, in this _proud metropolis_, seem to 'a' got the notion that because we haven't just stepped out of a fashion plate we can't play football. They tell us to 'thrash the hayseed out of our hair,' and to 'slack off on our galluses, and see if we can't get some o' that high-water out of our pants;' they've been 'tryin' to figure out our combined acreage o'

boot leather,' they say, 'and had to give it up; Arabic notation wa'n't equal to it.'

"Well, let 'em laugh. I reckon we're duck-backed enough to shed whole showers o' that kind o' stuff; and when the game comes off they'll find that what wins a game o' football ain't pants, nor hair, nor shoe-leather, but what's in and under 'em. They'll find _men's_ feet in those shoes, and _men's_ legs in those trousers, and the brains o'

men under that hair!

"For I tell you, we're goin' to win that game; and we're goin' to win it just because o' what gave us the hayseed an' the high-water and the boot-leather; because we've got on our side the men with muscle hardened on the old farm; men who've swung an axe from mornin' till night in the wood-lot, and cradled two acres of oats a day, and who'll go through 'em in a scrimmage like steers through standin' corn!