And so, some day when Dick or Ken is six or seven, Father produces a strange looking, leather-cased bladder out of a trunk where Mother hasn’t discovered it and blows it up out on the front porch under the youngster’s inquisitive eye and tucks in the neck and laces it up.

“What is it, Pop?  What you going to do with it?”

“That’s what men call a football, Son.  And right now I’m going to kick it.”  And kick it he does—­all around the lot—­until after a particularly good lift he chuckles to himself, the old war horse, and with the smell of ancient battles in his nostrils sits down to give the boy his first lesson in the manliest and best game on earth.  And this first lesson is tackling.  Perhaps the picture on the opposite page will remind you of the time you taught your boys the good old game.

This particular kind of football instinct has produced many of the finest players the colleges have ever seen.  In a real football family there isn’t much bluffing as to what you can do nor are there many excuses for a fumble or a missed tackle.  With your big brothers’ ears open and their tongues ready with a caustic remark, it doesn’t need “Pop’s” keen eye to keep you within the realms of truth as to the length of your run or why you missed that catch.

Quite often, as it happens, “Pop” is thinking of a certain big game he once played in and remembering a play—­Ah! if only he could forget that play!—­in which he fumbled and missed the chance of a life-time.  Like some inexorable motion picture film that refuses to throw anything but one fatal scene on the screen, his recollections make the actors take their well-remembered positions and the play begins.  For the thousandth time he gnashes his teeth as he sees the ball slip from his grasp.  “Dog-gone it,” he mutters, “if my boy doesn’t do better in the big game than I did, I’ll whale the hide off him!”

Strangely enough not all brothers of a football family follow one another to the same college, and there have been several cases where brother played against brother.  But for the only son of a great player to go anywhere else than to his father’s college would be rank heresy.  I daresay even the other college wouldn’t like it.

[Illustration:  JUST BOYS]

Of famous fathers whose football instinct descended without dilution into their sons perhaps the easiest remembered have been Walter Camp, who captained the Elis in ’78 and ’79 and whose son, Walter, Jr., played fullback in 1911—­Alfred T. Baker, one of the Princeton backs in ’83, and ’84, whose son Hobey captained his team in 1914—­Snake Ames, who played in four championship games for Princeton against both Yale and Harvard, and whose son, Knowlton Ames, Jr., played on the Princeton teams of ’12, ’13 and ’14—­and that sterling Yale tackle of ’91 and ’92, “Wallie” Winter, whose son, Wallace, Jr., played on his Freshman team in 1915.