“I want to record certain impressions made upon a certain freshman at Cornell, whither Newell went to coach the football team after his graduation from Harvard.  Those impressions are as fresh to-day as they were in that scarlet and gold autumn years ago.

“Here was a man built like the bole of a tree, alight with fire, determination, love of sport, and hunger for the task in hand.  He was no easy taskmaster, but always a just one.  Many a young man of that period will remember, as I do, the grinding day’s work when everything seemed to go wrong, when mere discouragement was gradually giving way to actual despair, when, somewhat clogged with mud and dust and blood, he felt a sudden slap on the back, and heard a cheery voice saying, ’Good work to-day.  Keep it up.’  Playing hard football himself, Newell demanded hard football of his pupils.  I wish, indeed, that some of the players of to-day who groan over a few minutes’ session with the soft tackling dummy of these times could see that hard, sole leather tackling dummy swung from a joist that went clear through it and armed with a shield that hit one over the head when he did not get properly down to his work, that Newell used.

“It was grinding work this, but through it one learned.

“That ancient and battered dummy is stowed away, a forgotten relic of the old days, in the gymnasium at Cornell.  There are not a few of us who, when returning to Ithaca, hunt it up to do it reverence.

“Let him for a moment transfer his allegiance to the scrub eleven, and in that moment the Varsity team knew that it was in a real football game.  They were hard days indeed on Percy Field, but good days.  I have seen Newell play single-handed against one side of the Varsity line, tear up the interference like a whirlwind, and bring down his man.  Many of us have played in our small way on the scrub when for purposes of illustration Newell occupied some point in the Varsity line.  We knew then what would be on top of us the instant the ball was snapped.  Yet when the heap was at its thickest Newell would still be in the middle of it or at the bottom, as the case might be, still working, and still coaching.  Both in his coaching at Harvard and at Cornell he developed men whose names will not be forgotten while the game endures, and some of these developments were in the nature of eleventh-hour triumphs for skill and forceful, yet none the less sympathetic, personality.

“After all, despite his remarkable work as a gridiron player and tutor, I like best to think of him as Newell, the man; I like best to recall those long Sunday afternoons when he walked through the woodland paths in the two big gorges, or over the fields at Ithaca in company much of the time with—­not the captain of the team, not the star halfback, not the great forward, but some young fellow fresh from school who was still down in the ruck of the squad.  More than once he called at now one, now another fraternity