That Night - 1915 Author:Freeman Tilden Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOOD INFLUENCE WHEN the city authorities laid out Jackson Park, they thoughtfully included a baseball diamond "for the little ones." I have never seen the... more » "little ones" playing on that diamond; but time and time I have sat under a nearby tree, summer afternoons, and watched the Shiny Cups playing the Rusty Dippers. I like to see the Shiny Cups playing the Rusty Dippers. I would rather view a game between the Shiny Cups and the Rusty Dippers than a post-season series in the big league. Here is sport without the suspicion of fraud; sport that is incontestably amateur; eighteen young men, all too strong to work, ridding themselves of surplus energy, heart and soul. Neither the Shiny Cups nor the Rusty Dippers would run a city block upon a "practical" matter, though the matter concerned the fate of nations; but they will tear around the bases, chase the ball like deerhounds and comport themselves with stupendous agility all the afternoon in Jackson Park. They are what the world was when the world was young. And Duff Cassidy was what the world was when the world was in its mere infancy. He symbolized the beginnings of human life. Duff was all action—no thought whatever; except the instinctive sort of mental activity necessary to complete a snappy double play. Duff was captain of the Rusty Dippers, and as Duff is going to be the principal figure in this narrative, I am going to give him the center of the stage, and throw the spotlight upon him. At the moment of introduction to you, Duff is twenty years old. In another year he will be qualified to vote, at least once, in the nineteenth ward. He has that fullness of frame and muscular development which draws from admiring members of his own social class the term "husky." A husky boy; no doubt about it. A face with good ...« less