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AMERICA'S NATIONAL GAME
467

master, together with a halftone cut illustrating some of his members—himself among them—in full Base Ball uniform, with the word "Sousa" emblazoned on every breast.

The following was published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean, Tuesday, May 5, 1891. It is in a vein characteristic of its author, Leonard Dana Washburn, an Inter-Ocean writer, who lost his life in a railway accident, in Indiana, a few months after this Base Ball story appeared:

"You can write home that Grandpa won yesterday.

"And say in the postscript that Willie Hutchinson did it. The sweet child stood out in the middle of the big diamond of pompadour grass and slammed balls down the path that looked like the biscuits of a bride. The day was dark, and when Mr. Hutchinson shook out the coils of his right arm, rubbed his left toe meditatively in the soil he loves so well, and let go, there was a blinding streak through the air like the tail of a skyrocket against a black sky. There would follow the ball a hopeless shriek, the shrill, whistling noise of a bat grippling with the wind, and a dull, stifled squash like a portly gentleman sitting down on a ripe tomato.

"Then Umpire McQuaid would call the attention of a person in a gray uniform to the fact that circumstances rendered it almost imperative for him to go away and give somebody else a chance.

"There were ten of the visiting delegation who walked jauntily to the plate and argued with the cold, moist air. Mr. Field lacerated the ethereal microbes three times out of four opportunities to get solid with the ball, and Brer Lewis Robinson Browning walked away from the plate with a pained expression twice in succession. The Gastown folks found the ball six times. Two of their runs were earned.

"Mr. Staley, who pitches for the strangers, did not have speed enough to pass a street car going in the opposite direction. His balls wandered down toward the plate like a boy on his way to school. If our zealous and public-spirited townsmen did not baste them all over that voting precinct it was because they grew weary and faint waiting for them to arrive. Dahlen continued his star engagement with the bat, getting a single, a slashing double, and a triple that missed being a four-timer only by the skin of its teeth.

"Even with all this, it is probable that Pittsburg would have won the game had it not been for a party named Miller, who played short for the wanderers. He covered about as much ground as a woodshed, and threw to first like a drunkard with a cork leg. By