Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/89

Rh his lamentable ignorance and right willingly. The "souvenir" booklet had been printed a week before the race, too soon to record the change in the personnel of the Yale eight, and there was her boy's picture filling a page, a massive young giant, most scantily clothed. The man from the West saw in the picture the mother's brown eyes, and his heart was stirred, for he knew what it was to have an only son with his mother's eyes.

"Yes, John has been on the crew three years," she confided, "and he will be the captain next year. I fairly live with him in spirit through the whole six months of the training season. He has had a very hard time this season, and lately his letters have been a little despondent. But I was never so delighted as when I learned from the head-lines of this morning's newspapers that there has been a wonderful improvement in the last week. Oh, I am excited, there is no use trying to deny it. It is almost too big an event for an old woman to survive."

The gray-haired stranger was comforting, and in the recesses of his memory