A Ball Player's Career, page 9 by Adrian C. Anson
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the old town and properly thankful that a fate that then seemed most unkind kept him from becoming a professional ball player.
Looking back over my youthful experiences I marvel that I have ever lived to relate them, and that I did not receive at least a hundred thrashings for every one that was given me. I know now that I fully deserved all that I received, and more, too. My father was certainly in those days a most patient man. I have recorded the fact elsewhere that I was as averse to work as I was to study, and I had a way of avoiding it at times that was peculiarly my own.
While I was still a boy in Marshalltown and before I had graduated (?) from either the State University or the college of Notre Dame, my father kept a hotel known as the Anson House. The old gentleman was at that tune the possessor of a silver watch, and to own that watch was the height of my ambition. Time and again I begged him to give it to me, but he had turned a deaf ear to my importunities.
In the back yard of the hotel one day when I had been begging him for the gift harder than usual, there stood a huge pile of wood that needed splitting, and looking at this he remarked, that I could earn the watch if I chose by doing the task. He was about to take a journey at the time and I asked him if he really meant it. He replied that he did, and started away.
I don't think he had any more idea of my doing the task than he had of my flying. I had some ideas of my own on the subject, however, and he was scarcely out of sight before I began to put them into execution. The larder of the hotel was well stocked, and cookies and doughnuts were as good a currency as gold and silver among boys of my acquaintance. This being the case it dawned upon my mind that I could sublet the contract, a plan than I was not long in putting into practice.
Many hands make quick work, and it was not long before I had a little army of boys at work demolishing that wood pile. The chunks that were too big and hard to split we placed o