Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/104

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN dawn, not with "Allah il Allah", but with the minor chord dirge:

R-E-M-O-R-S-E,

The water wagon Is the place for me.

Shall we give up the Philippines? Never! Their Americanization now is complete.

Pop Anson's Chicago White Sox were playing the New York Giants, James Mutrie, manager, at the old Polo Grounds, Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Tenth Street, the middle of May of 1888. Digby Bell had converted me to baseball several years earlier. We were at the Polo Grounds every free afternoon, and both of us for two years had given an annual Sunday-night benefit for the Giants, who had no world-series money to look forward to in that day. In appreciation, the team had presented each of us with gold-headed canes inscribed "From the boys to our best boy friend." That and the friendship of Buck Ewing, Tim Keefe and John M. Ward were my proudest chattels.

Bell and I suggested to Colonel McCaull, for whom both of us were working, that a baseball night, with the White Sox in one row of boxes and the Giants in an opposite row, would be a