.

HOW MY WINTERS WERE SPENT.
How do the members of the base-ball fraternity spend the winter seasons?
If I have been asked that question once I have been asked it a thousand times.

The public, as a rule, seem to think that because a man is a professional ball player and therefore employed but seven months in the year he must necessarily spend the other five in idleness, and there are doubtless some few ball players that spend their winters in that way, but, be it said to the credit of the craft, there are not many of them.
There is no man upon whose hands time hangs so heavily as it does upon the hands of him who has nothing to do, at least that has been my experience, and for that reason I have always managed to busy myself at something during the winter months.

Some of the things that I engaged in proved profitable, others did not, but, all-in-all, the winter of 1885 yielded me the best results of my life, for that winter I spent in doing what the old gentleman had wanted me to do years before, viz., in going to school.

I had a very good reason for doing this, as you can readily see.
During my ball-playing career I had entrusted some money to the old gentleman up in Marshalltown for safe keeping, and while up there on a visit in the fall of 1884, needing some coin, I asked for it.
"Figure up how much I owe you, interest and all," was his reply, "and we will have a settlement." Now, the old gentleman might just as well have set me down at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with a wheelbarrow and told me to carry them away to the Atlantic coast on that vehicle, as to have asked me to do an example in interest, and I was too ashamed of my ignorance to allow him to know that such a thing was beyond my powers, so I managed to get around the matter in some way, but I made up my mind then and there that I would at the first opportunity learn at best enough to take care of my own business.