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Updated: June 18, 2025
This wall in the background, rounded like a dome's festoon on the sky, has become little by little crowned with heads of children, little Basques, little cats, ball-players of the future, who soon will precipitate themselves like a flight of birds, to pick up the ball every time when, thrown too high, it will go beyond the square and fall in the fields.
The regimental bandsmen went to war with their instruments cased and rifles over their shoulders. On the navy-yard parade-ground a sailor baseball nine from one of the battleships was at practice. The marines slipped away so quietly that the ball-players did not know until afterward that they had missed seeing the departure of 2,700 men bound for the battle-front.
As the lawn was now evacuated, en masse, Aristabulus proceeded with alacrity to the house, and went into the library, where Mr. Effingham was patiently waiting his return. "I am happy to inform you, sir," commenced the ambassador, "that the ball-players have adjourned; and as for Mr. Lather, he declines your proposition." "Declines my proposition!"
The cage was a huge, open, airy room, lighted by many windows, and, with the exception of the platform where he stood, it was entirely enclosed by heavy netting. The floor was of bare ground well raked and loosened to make it soft. This immense hall was full of a motley crowd of aspiring ball-players.
Curious to discover the subject of his abstraction, I stole cautiously behind him, and saw that he was sketching the head of a tall and rather handsome squaw, who, in the midst of a hundred others, was standing close to the gateway watching the preparations of the Indian ball-players.
And here thunderously beating, hard at hand, overpowering all lesser sounds, the drums of loco responded. To the vibrations of these sonorous earthen cylinders, the sticks plied with a will on the heads of wet deerskins tightly stretched, the ball-players of Niowee advanced.
He did not doubt that he would be able to keep his promise, for he had found a new way to Tiberias; a deserted way it seemed to be at first, and most propitious, without the temptations of ball-players, but as the season advanced the lane became infested by showmen on their way to Tiberias: mummers, acrobats, jugglers, fortune-tellers, star-mongers, dealers in charms and amulets, and Joseph was tempted more than once to stop and speak with these random folk, but the promise he had given Azariah was sufficiently powerful to inspire a dread and a dislike of these, and to avoid them he sought for a third way to Tiberias and found one: a path through an orchard belonging to a neighbour who was glad to give him permission to pass through it every morning, which he did, thereby making progress in his studies till one day, by the stile over which his custom was to vault into the quiet lane, he came suddenly upon what seemed to him like a small encampment: wayfarers of some sort he judged them to be, but of what sort he could not tell at first, there being some distance and the branches of an apple-tree between him and them.
All the various tones of the gamut were on the air, the deep bass guttural laugh of the braves; the shrill callow yelping of boys; the absent-minded bawl of spoiled pappooses interested in the stir, but with an ever-recurrent recollection of the business of vocally disciplining their patient mothers; the keen treble chatter of women, all were suddenly resolved into a strong dominant chord of sound as a tremendous shout arose upon the appearance of the ball-players of Ioco.
Instantly he was up and, with never a backward glance, was running across the lower, narrower verge of Indian Field, making for the trees which edged it thickly upon the east. He could run fast, too. Nor were there men in front to hinder him, since because of the rain, coming down in a thin drizzle, the wide, sloped stretch of turf was for this once bare of ball-players and cricket teams.
It is true, these apprentices were not voters, but then some of them speedily would be, and all of them, moreover, had tongues, an instrument Mr. Bragg held in quite as much awe as some men dread salt-petre. In passing the ball-players, he called out in a wheedling tone to their ringleader, a notorious street brawler
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