Page:The purple pennant (IA purplepennant00barb).pdf/282

Rh ly because he was naturally an apt pupil and partly because Mr. Addicks was a patient and capable instructor. When a point couldn't be made quite clear with words Mr. Addicks stepped onto the cinders and illustrated it, and Perry couldn't help but understand. I think Mr. Addicks got as much pleasure, and possibly as much benefit, from the lessons as Perry did. He confessed the second morning that what little running he had done the day before had lamed him considerably, and declared his intention of getting back into trim again and staying there. At the end of a week he was doing two and three laps of the track and never feeling it. Fudge, who joined them occasionally, became ardently admiring of such running as that of Mr. Addicks' and regretted that he had not gone in for the middle distances. "That," he confided to Perry one morning, "is what I call the p-p-p-poetry of motion!" And he managed to make it sound absolutely original!

Mr. Addicks insisted that Perry should specialize on the two-hundred-and-twenty-yards dash, and coached him carefully over almost every foot of that distance, from the moment he put his spikes into the holes and awaited the signal, until he had crossed the line, arms up and head back. Perry, who had been complimented on his starting, dis-