Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1883 — The National Game. [ARTICLE]

The National Game.

With the champion base ball nine, an oarsman with the fastest three-mile record, a slugger who can mop the floor with any man in tije universe, and a cock-eyed Governor who is a national issue—like X, an unknown quantity—who would mot be proud to claim a local habitation and a name in Massachusetts? The champion ball niae, and the champion poor-house! The one offsets the other, and both must go thundering down the ages hand in hand. Hand in hand walk catcher, pitcher, short-stop, fielders, basemen and the skinless ghosts of Tewksbury! Hand in hand walk Butler and the Slugger of the Hub! Hand in hand come groups of pale-faced, cultured maidens with gig-lamps before their lustrous orbs, and strewing flowersKand Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass" beneath the champions’ feet! Bing out wild bells to a wild and untamed sky, or sundry epithets to that effect. Encore the carnival, dyspeptic savants of the Concord school! Shades of the departed Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, behold the champion base ball nine of Boston! Count the compound fractures on the coarse and bulging knuckles. Now, mark you, here a foul tip mashed that Grecian nose, and spread it like a poultice upon the catcher’s face. That puffy ear, caught up with a lock stitch, and held in place on the pitcher’s head by a silver link, was loosened from its base by an awkward batter, whose weapon slipped and hurtled on its deadly mission toward the pitcher’s box. Mark you that limp which emphasizes every step the weary phort-stop takes? A brutal baseman felled him to the ground and danced a can-can on his prostrate body in his long spiked shoes. Observe that eyq worn by the center fielder, now closed forever to the gladsome light of day. The umpire struck him in the heat oi quick debate, and the eye went out, to gleam no more athwart the diamond field. And so they limp, these Boston cripples, toiling homeward from the fields of glory. »,<Let Shamut avenue and Beacon street sing peace to their triumph. Let the big organ roll forth a deep, impressive symphony of praise. Let Wendell Phillips wake the echoes with a welcoming speech, and Butler cap the climax with a comic song and dance. Let Tewksbury’s horrors all forgotten be, and naught but Boston’s triumph on the diamond field be treasured in the memory of man.—Terras Siftings..