"What did you expect?" he asked, and then: "Did you have much on it?"
"Nothing but interest," I replied.
"That's where you are ahead of me," he said. "I had some capital on
it!"
"Did you expect Harvard to win?"
"Who, I? Not in a thousand years; but just to cheer the boys up a
bit I put a few pounds on them. Well, it's all gone, but I guess
I'll charge it up to the 'Charity Fund,' and so have a few coppers
left for a cigar after dinner."
"No," he said, speaking seriously for a moment, "I went down to the
Harvard quarters yesterday to see Tom Burch's son, who is in the
crew, and, say, I hadn't been there five minutes when all the 'pep'
began to ooze out of me. Those boys have been training for three
weeks in this muggy climate, and it has sapped 'em. I don't say they
could have won, anyway, for I understand that that Cambridge bunch is
a hard proposition--one of the best crews they have turned out in
years--but they might just as well have given our boys a dose of
bromide every morning before breakfast as to train them in the Thames
valley. If I had the handling of a crew over here, I'd put them on
the river the day before the race, so as to learn their way through
this winding creek they call a river, and the next day I'd call the
race, while those boys still had some U.S. ozone in them. Well, it's
all in the family," he continued, "and it will serve as a set-off to
the cup races and the polo games, and as long as it was not a German
crew that won, I don't much care." I saw by the twitching of his
lips that there was a story coming, and was not disappointed. But it
is too long for this letter, and so will have to be given in my next.