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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

T H E F U T U R E O F T H E WO R L D
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

The Future of the World

Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle
for the Post-Cold War Imagination

JENNY ANDERSSON

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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© Jenny Andersson 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

For Liv
Maman, tu travailles vraiment sur le futur? Mais c’est quoi, en fait?
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

Acknowledgments

This book came not only out of my personal research but also out of the collective
efforts of the Futurepol project in Paris. I acknowledge funding from the European
Research Council through grant 283706. The ERC grant allowed for extensive
archival and documentary work. Egle Rindzeviciute, Viteszlav Sommer, Sybille
Duhautois, Pauline Prat, and Adam Freeman were a truly outstanding group of
scholars and I thank all of them for their input to this book. I hope that I have
done justice to their work in the coming pages. I particularly want to acknowledge
the invaluable help from Vita Sommer as well as from Malgorzata Mazurek, Lukas
Becht, and David Priestland on what became Chapter 7. I also want to thank two
research assistants, Kecia Fong who helped me access Lewis Mumford’s materials
at UPenn when I could not travel, and Grayson Fuller in Paris.
The book as a whole has benefited from many colleagues in different disciplines:
Erik Westholm, Marie-Laure Djelic, Michael Gordin, Dominique Pestre, Nicolas
Guilhot, Sonja Amadae, Martin Giraudeau, Benoit Pelopidas, Daniel Steinmetz
Jenkins, Mathieu Leimgruber, Mathias Schmelzer, Jennifer Light, John Hall, Paul
Edwards, Gabrielle Hecht, Stephane van Damme, Barbara Adam, Sandra Kemp,
Jakob Vogel, Paul Warde, Marc Lazar, Nicolas Delalandes, Ariane Leendertz,
Patricia Clavin, Caspar Sylvest, Or Rosenboim, Wolfgang Streeck, Robert Fishman,
Marion Fourcade, Desmond King, and Jens Beckert. Particular thanks go to Nils
Gilman and Duncan Bell for their comments on the first draft manuscript, as well
as to the Oxford editors for their enthusiasm and reactivity.
I have relied extensively on the work of librarians and archivists in many fine
institutions. Ngram views can take you a bit of the way but, thankfully, we still
have libraries and archives. I am particularly indebted to the people that I inter-
viewed and talked to during the research for the book. As these conversations
ranged from proper interviews to more informal talks, I list them here: Lars
Ingelstam and Göran Bäckstrand in Sweden, Bart van Steenbergen in the
Netherlands, Theodore Gordon in upstate New York, Anthony Judge in Brussels,
Wendell Bell in New Haven, James Dator in Paris and Honolulu, Jennifer Gidley
in Melbourne, Hugues de Jouvenel in Paris, and Jerome Glenn in Washington.
Particular thanks to Eleonora Masini, whose living room I invaded for a week
while her grandchildren carried boxes of old documents up and down the stairs,
and to Ted Gordon for the use of personal photos.
About halfway through this book, I fell very ill. As I was diagnosed, many of my
friends and colleagues became the pillars of a monumental support network.
Thanks to everyone at Sciences Po, MaxPo, and CEE and particularly Florence
Faucher, Linda Amrani, Renaud Dehousse and Laurie Boussaguet, Sarah
Gensberger, Imola Streho, Sandrine Perrot, Olivier Godechot, Allison Rovny, and
Patrick Legales. Thanks to my friends, Ann Gallagher and Frank Roselli in
Somerville, who let me use my old postdoc room while working in Cambridge
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

viii Acknowledgments

archives, and thanks to Paul Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht for an edifying dinner
conversation as I finished my archival research at Ann Arbor. Thanks also to Nina
Larriaga and Jenny Bastide and their families, and to Rana and Lars Wedin. My
sister Lina Cronebäck, Henrik, Lovisa, and Estelle and my parents have been by
my side. So has my husband Olivier Borraz, with whom I have shared some very
difficult moments but also the very happiest ones. Liv Andersson Borraz is the light
of my life, my lovely, courageous, curious, clever daughter. Vous êtes mes amours.
Merci also to Rouzbeh Parsi.
The cover image of the book shows the Future Boardgame, invented by Ted
Gordon, Olaf Helmer, and Hans Goldschmidt in 1969 for the American company
Kaiser Aluminum. The game is in Ted Gordon’s possession.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

Contents
List of Figures xiii
List of Abbreviations xv

1. Introduction 1
The Problem of the Future 1
Repertoires of Future Making: Origins of Future Expertise 4
Understanding the Spaces of Futurism: A Note on Method 8
The Structure of the Book 12

2. A New History of the Future? From Conceptual History

to Intellectual World History 14
Why Did Historians Lose Sight of the Future? 14
Revisiting Social Time 18
The Future as Global Category 20
Imagining a Post-Cold War World 26

3. The Future as Moral Imperative. Foundations of Futurism 30

The End 30
Cosmic Powers 32
Prediction as Power Over Time 35
The Future is Us 37
Mankind40
The Invention of Futurology by a Ukrainian Jew in Atlanta 43
Concluding Remarks 47

4. Futures of Liberalism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom

and Futurology as a Transnational Space 49
From the End of Ideology to Futurology: The Congress
for Cultural Freedom 49
An Open vs. Closed Future 50
A Liberal Theory of History: Daniel Bell and the End of Ideology 54
The Future of Democratic Institutions: The Ford Foundation
and the Futuribles Project 57
The Future as Synthèse and Rational Decision in the Centre de Prospective 65
Conjecture as Anti-Planning: The Surmising Forum 70
Concluding Remarks 73

5. The Future as Social Technology. Prediction and the Rise of Futurology 75

A General Theory of the Future 75
The Future as Social Technology 76
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

x Contents
From the Long Range to the Long Term 82
Formalizing Expert Opinion: The Invention of Delphi 85
Substituting Passionate Opinion 90
Concluding Remarks: Traveling Delphi 96

6. Predicting the Future of American Society: From RAND

to the Commission for the Year 2000 98
The End of Ideology Thesis Revisited 98
Social Change as a Deliberately Planned Process: From Planning
to Prediction 101
A Sense of National Priority 106
Rational Social Choice 110
People Who Can Read Trends 114
Future Crash 118
Concluding Remarks 120

7. Bridging the Iron Curtain. Futurology as Dissidence and Control 122

Dreams of an Open Future 122
A New Future Horizon: The Polska 2000 Group 127
Civilization at the Crossroads and the Futurological Society
of the Prague Spring 134
In Russian the Word Future Exists Only in the Singular 139
Futures Studies as Dissidence: Mihail Botes and the Center
for Methodological Future Research in Bucharest 146
Concluding Remarks: from Futurology to Prognostika 150

8. The Future of the World. The World Futures Studies Federation

and the Future as Counter Expertise 151
Taking Future Research to the World 151
The Image 155
The Future as Radical Imagination 158
Reshaping Activism: Future Research and Social Science 161
Data-in-being165
The Anti-RAND: Uniting World Social Movements 167
Models as Micro-utopias 174
The World Plan 176
The Future Workshop 179
Concluding Remarks 181

9. The Futurists. Experts in World Futures 184

From System to Self 184
The Look Out Institution: The World Futures Studies Federation 188
I’m Off to Pyongyang to See Some Friends. Futurism after 1989 196
Man: The Fundamental Particle 198
Future Artefacts. The Constitution of Global Future Expertise 207
Concluding Remarks: The Future Factory 211
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

Contents xi

10. Conclusion 213

One or Many Futures 213
The Image of the Future 217
The Problem of Foreclosure 222

Bibliography 227
Index 251
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

List of Figures
2.1. Apparatus for Playing a Game Involving Forecasting of Future Events, 1969 25
3.1. Tomorrow is Already Here 37
4.1. The Future of Political Institutions, Paris 1966 74
5.1. Delphi, 1964 88
5.2. Delphi Matrix 89
5.3. Theodore Gordon and Olaf Helmer at RAND in Front of the
Future Boardgame 95
8.1. The Mankind 2000 Trinity of Possible, Desirable, and Realizable Futures 154
8.2. Future Workshop, 1984 180
9.1. Syncon. Huntsville, Alabama, 1973 206
9.2. The Global Futures Network 210
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

List of Abbreviations
BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France
CdP Centre de Prospective
CFF Congress for Cultural Freedom
CRC Centre d’études et de recherches des chefs de l’entreprise
CY2000 Commission for the Year 2000
FFA Ford Foundation Archives
FFEPH Fondation française de l’étude des problèmes humains
IIASA International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
ISA International Sociological Association
MPS Mont Pelerin Society
MSH Maison des sciences de l’homme
RAC Rockefeller Archives Center
RAND Research and Development Corporation
SEDEIS Société d’études et de documentation économiques industrielles
WFSF World Futures Studies Federation
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

1
Introduction

T H E P RO B L E M O F T H E F U T U R E

In a number of essays published in a book with the title Between Past and Future in
1961, Hannah Arendt wrote that Mankind had severed its links to the past, thereby
losing all hope of a human future.1 The future, cut loose from all past experiences, was
adrift in a sea of meaningless time. History was no more. Time was but a simple
prolongation of a deeply anguished present. As the realm of dreams of human
improvement, the future had no sense. This empty future was the starkest sign, to
Arendt, of a pervasive crisis of Man. In its magnanimous belief in science and technol-
ogy, humanity had replaced all eschatological and moral notions with the totalizing
idea of constant progress. In such a futuristic world, no future was possible.2
Hannah Arendt was not alone in understanding, after World War 2, the future as
a fundamental political problem. Walter Benjamin’s famous essays on history iden-
tified progress as a totalitarian force and the future as a mechanistic and oppressive
dystopia personified in the terrifying vision of an angel blowing backwards on a
storm called progress.3 Before his suicide on the Spanish border in November
1940, Benjamin handed the German manuscript of Theses on the Philosophy of
History to Arendt, and Arendt carried it in her suitcase to New York, where she
published it.4 Benjamin’s conception of the future as a totalitarian sphere would,
in her own work, translate into a set of arguments about the future as a fundamen-
tal problem for the “human condition.” After 1945, freedom was threatened by a
set of earth changing factors. The futurism born in an interwar romance with
machines, science, and technology had developed into the ideology of totalitarian-
ism, the totalizing nature of which lay precisely in its grasp on the human future.
Through the negation of the plural nature of the future, totalitarianism projected
one future that was also a non-future as the open character of the future was by
definition a threat to totalitarian power. A fundamentally hollowed out category,
the future was up for grabs, empty to be filled with new forms of meaning.5

1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin
classics, 1961).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1998),
1–6, and sections 34, 35.
3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968).
4 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004), 166–7.
5 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age”, in Between Past and Future.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

2 The Future of the World

Arendt’s conception of a threatened future was central for her understanding of

the shifting nature of political power in the post-war world. Arendt was not a
futurist. But her apprehensions of the consequences of a closing down of the future
for any kind of philosophical optimism or political agency were shared in the post-
war period by an unexpected mix of intellectuals and thinkers, such as the urban
theorist Lewis Mumford and the journalist Robert Jungk, the German Marxist
Ossip Flechtheim, the Quaker couple Elise and Kenneth Boulding, and the
American economist John McHale. These thinkers would be central in the laying
of the foundations of the eclectic field of futurism.6 Futurists argued that human-
ity needed new forms of knowledge, new instruments and tools with which to
shape, alter, and ultimately salvage, future developments, and through those, the
world itself. They were deeply troubled by the spread of new forms of prediction as
part of the Cold War struggle, and with the rise of a new scientific expertise over
what was in the 1950s and 1960s referred to as the “long term.” The coming chapters
explain this category, a product of ballistic engineering and space research.7
This book lays out the history of the complex activity called futurism, futurology,
futures studies, prognostics, or, quite simply, future research. It explains that these
strands were composed of profoundly different claims about how to know and
change the future, and through that future, the world. The future that emerged
after 1945 was, I propose, a field of struggle between different conceptions of how
to control, or, radically transform, the Cold War world. An idea of the future as a
fundamentally moral category stood against the “long term” as a category of con-
trol and management. The post-war future was a terrain of both imagination and
scientist reasoning. This reflects a fundamental dividing line in the contemporary
notion of the future between conceptions of the future as coming physical reality
and as the product of law bound developments, or, as a quintessential social con-
struct, beginning in the minds and hearts of people and reachable only through a
transcendental act of love and imagination.8 These different categories ascribed
very different conceptions not only of the scope of human influence on the world,
but also to the place of human beings within that world.
There were specific reasons why the future emerged as a core problem of human
action after 1945. The post-war world was, more than any previous historical
world, marked by the idea of human influence, and with the idea of unprecedented
influence came new conceptions of consequence, reach, and responsibility. The
“long term,” post-1945, was understood not as a distant and free floating contin­
ent of time, but as a set of direct and aggregate consequences of the present, an
outcome of myriads of forms of decision and multiple forms of action, some of which
led to good futures, and some of which seemed profoundly undesirable. In addition,
predictive experimentation after 1945 turned the future into a manageable and

6 I use futurism here to denote a set of approaches to the future that came out of post-war social
science and that have no relation to the interwar revolutionary art movement.
7 Jenny Andersson, “The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World,” in American
Historical Review, 2012, 117 (5): 1411–31.
8 See Kenneth Boulding, The Image. Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1956).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/07/18, SPi

Introduction 3

rationalized entity. In the social sciences, prediction had been confined to the
dustbins since the grand schemas of Condorcet and Comte, with the exception of
economics.9 But after 1945, a range of predictive experiments appeared, including
attempts to foresee the evolution of technology, the international system, human
values, and political decision making. The effect of this was that the future, which
had been discussed as a moral and philosophical category since the seventeenth
century, became an object of social science. That the future lacked physical presence
and could therefore not be the object of direct observation was a problem long
discussed in the history of probabilistic reasoning.10 But after 1945, the progress
in quantitative surveys and multivariate analysis, in computer led simulation and
modeling in a range of fields seemed to give long-term developments empirical and
observable shape. Forms of probabilism could therefore be complemented with
empirical and manipulable observations of changes both in human behavior and
the surrounding world order. The future could take on a form of presence.
This presence was highly ambiguous. In many ways, the idea that the future
could be rendered visible and hence inherently governable can be thought of, in
the historian James Scott’s terms, as part of a high modernist attempt of rational-
ization of uncharted territory.11 Futurology, from this perspective, would seem to
mark the high point of planning rationalities and attempts at active steering and
problem solving in the post-war era. The book does not contradict this, but it
argues that futurology was a highly complex project, one that in fact included not
only important attempts to control the Cold War world, but also central forms of
protest and dissent. Futurology contained both reassured notions of the stable
structures of the present, and anxious notions of unforeseen and radical changes.
As such, futurology seems to stand on the verge between high modernity and its
postulated crisis, and I put forward the argument that futurology enacted a central
debate in intellectual history on the malleability of coming time. The years between
1964 and 1973, the high point of future research, were marked by a not unique
but nevertheless historically specific understanding that the present was a far from
stable structure. Social, economic, and technological developments of modern
industrial societies posed challenges to particular conceptions of stability and con-
tinuity, as industrial societies turned into post-industrial ones. New versions of
positivism in modernization theory and behavioralism in the 1950s were attempts
to capture the nature of this present. As the belief in positivism and technocracy
faded toward the latter half of the 1960s, the question remained of how, absent
such forms of reassurance of relative predictability, the future could be addressed.
Futurology played out pervasive discourses of those decades on post-industrialism,

9 Phillip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Phillip Mirowski, Machine Dreams. How Economics
Became a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10 Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability,
Induction and Statistical Inference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ian Hacking, The
Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
11 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Failed
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); see also Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts. Egypt,
Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The pennant
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The pennant

Author: Everett T. Tomlinson

Release date: February 3, 2024 [eBook #72863]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1912

Credits: Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

PENNANT ***
“But, man, you aren’t going to pay the bills”
 THE PENNANT
BY

EVERETT T. TOMLINSON
Author of “Carl Hall of Tait,” “Captain Dan Richards,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED

PUBLISHERS
BARSE & HOPKINS
NEW YORK, N. Y. NEWARK, N. J.
 Copyright, 1912
by
BARSE & HOPKINS

MADE IN U. S. A.
 CONTENTS
Chapter Page

I. On Six Town Pond 11

II. Dan’s Project 20
III. Great Snakes 29
IV. The Reward of Patience 38
V. Preparation 48
VI. The Game 57
VII. A Dispute 67
VIII. A Record 76
IX. Studying a Boy 86
X. Mr. Borden Decides 96
XI. A Refusal 106
XII. Dan Reconsiders 116
XIII. Entering School 126
XIV. New Acquaintances 135
XV. Walter’s Suggestions 145
XVI. A Scrub Game 154
XVII. A Try-out 164
XVIII. A New Pitcher 173
XIX. School Life 181
XX. A Change in Walter 193
 XXI. Dan’s Troubles 202
XXII. Changed Relations 212
XXIII. An Unexpected Visitor 222
XXIV. The Opening of the League Games 232
XXV. A Plot 237
XXVI. Walter’s Illness 252
XXVII. The League Game 260
XXVIII. The End of the Game 271
XXIX. The Anger of the Nine 281
XXX. Dan’s Struggle 290
XXXI. The Final Game 299
XXXII. Conclusion 309
THE PENNANT
 CHAPTER I
ON SIX TOWN POND

“H ave you tried the fishing this summer?”

“No; I’ve been too busy on the farm. This is the first day I
have had when I could get away.”
“It looks like rain. Is that the reason why you’ve dropped the shovel
and the hoe?”
“Partly. It’s more though, for the two dollars a day you’ve agreed to
pay me for rowing you over the pond. I can’t pick that up on the farm,
you know.”
“You’ll soon be a rich man if you don’t look out. Ever thought what
you’d do with all your money?”
“Yes; I’ve thought a good lot about it. Perhaps ‘thinking’ about it is
as far as I’ll ever get with it.”
“How are you going to invest it?”
“I’d like to get enough to help me go to school.”
Walter Borden sat quietly erect in the stern of the rude skiff in
which he was seated, lazily holding a rod in his hands from which a
long line was paid out in the hope that some stray pickerel in Six
Town Pond might be tempted by the bait displayed.
A half-hour before the time when the conversation recorded above
had taken place he and his companion, Dan Richards, had driven
seven miles from the home of Walter’s grandfather, for the day,
which was to be devoted to fishing in the pond, that extended three
miles in length and in places was a mile or more wide. The little body
of water was well known in the region for the fish which were said to
be found in its depths, and Walter was convinced that the reports
were not exaggerated, for in numerous summers preceding the one
when this story opens he had tested the fact with varying degrees of
success.
Every summer Walter came from his home in New York to spend
at least a part of his vacation on the farm of his Grandfather
Sprague. The broad acres, the great roomy barns, the cattle and
horses, the deep brook that sped swiftly through the pasture, even
the old-fashioned farmhouse with its garret and its broad piazzas, to
say nothing of the many low rooms with their numerous windows,
had every one a place dear to Walter’s heart. From his earliest
recollections, here was the place where his summer days had been
passed. So eager was he to come, that when he was only ten years
old his father and mother had yielded to his pleadings and seen him
safely entrusted to the conductor and porter of the sleeping-car, and
alone he had gone on the journey of three hundred miles to
Rodman, the little village a half-mile distant from Grandfather
Sprague’s home. It is true this is the form which Walter took to
describe the place, although an ordinary observer would have said
that the Sprague farm was half a mile from the village.
Later in the summer Mrs. Borden came to join her boy and pay her
annual visit to her father and mother. Her words of wonderment,
when she arrived, at the change in her boy’s appearance since he
had left home did not vary much from year to year. The tanned
cheeks, the firmer muscles, the keen appetite, that made
Grandfather Sprague shake his head as the cook’s johnny-cakes
disappeared twice a day almost as silently as the dew from the
shaded lawn, were an annual delight to Mrs. Borden.
“Beats all how much a boy can hold,” Grandfather Sprague daily
would say as he watched the hungry lad.
Those days were gone now, for Walter Borden was a well-grown
muscular boy of sixteen. “I haven’t a doubt that I can put you on the
bed yet,” laughed his grandfather, his eyes twinkling as he spoke.
“You’d better not try it,” laughed Walter’s mother, glancing in pride
at her boy.
 “Come on, grandfather,” Walter would call out laughingly; “try it!”
“‘Try it’!” retorted Grandfather Sprague. “I’m not going to ‘try’ it; I’m
going to do it!”
“When?” laughed Walter.
“One time is as good as another.”
“Do it now! Do it now!” retorted the lad.
“You’re nothing but a little whipper-snapper. You don’t weigh more
than a hundred and fifty.”
“How much do you weigh, grandfather?”
“Two hundred and ten.”
“All right. You have the advantage in weight. I’ll not count it though,
if you’ll put me on the bed.”
“Don’t try it, pa,” spoke up Grandmother Sprague. “You might slip
and break your leg.”
“Or hurt his pride,” laughed Walter, whose love and respect for his
grandfather were almost as keen as was the old man’s love for the
stalwart lad.
“Pooh, ma,” the old gentleman retorted a trifle testily. “You don’t
suppose I’m so old I can’t take my own grandson across my lap and
spank him as he deserves, do you?”
“You might if he would lie still,” replied Mrs. Sprague dryly. “But
you and I were born on the same day and so I know just how old you
are. You are seventy-seven——”
“And almost as spry as ever I was,” broke in her husband. “I don’t
feel a day older than when I was forty. The only thing that troubles
me any is that I stub my toe more than I used to.”
“You take my advice and don’t bother with Walter.”
“Well, to please you, ma, I’ll give him a day of grace. But I give you
fair warning,” he would add turning to the laughing boy, “that to-
morrow at ten-thirty I shall give you what you deserve.”
 “To-morrow at ten-thirty,” brought a daily repetition of the scene
and conversation and not yet had Grandfather Sprague found just
the time for displaying his prowess. His deep love for Walter was a
source of joy to his grandson, who almost revered his portly, jolly,
devout grandfather. His happiest days were those spent on the farm,
and next to them were the visits of his grandfather and grandmother
to the city.
According to Grandfather Sprague, all the members of the family
were in a conspiracy to “spoil the boy,” that is, all except himself. He
was for letting the boy know his proper place. But if anyone had ever
heard of Grandfather Sprague refusing a request of Walter, or failing
to be the first to herald his success in school or on the athletic field,
he had held his peace so successfully that none had ever heard his
testimony.
Every spot and creature on the farm were known to Walter. He had
tramped in the woods, fished in the brooks, ridden the horses, driven
the cows from the pasture to the barns—in fact, in former years the
only moments when he had not been busy had been those when his
tired little body was asleep. The collie and the horse which had been
given him brought Walter’s life a little more closely into touch with
animate things, but his chief interest aside from his grandfather’s
place was in Dan Richards, who lived with his widowed mother and
his brother Tom—a year and a half older than Dan—on the little farm
adjoining.
Dan’s skill in making whistles of the willows, his unusual strength,
his quiet bearing had appealed strongly to Walter in other days.
Even now, when both were older and Dan’s lack of money was as
marked as was Walter’s freedom in its use and disregard of its true
value, there was a similar feeling of regard in Walter’s heart. The
dark eyes, the tall form, the quiet unassuming ways of Dan were still
almost as strong in their appeal to Walter as were the undoubted
possession of physical strength and skill which were Dan’s. The
quiet manner in which Dan had accepted his friend’s offer to pay him
for rowing on the pond had deceived Walter completely. His blue
eyes, his light-brown hair, his well-knit muscular body—“stocky” Dan
called him, were not in sharper contrast to Dan’s physical
characteristics than were their differences in mind and temper. The
offer to “employ” his old friend had meant little to Walter. How much
of an effort it had been for Dan to accept he never for a moment
even suspected. Even his expression of surprise when he looked up
hastily, as Dan explained how he hoped to invest his earnings, did
not have in it one glance of understanding. Dan and the little
“Rockland Farm,” which, with the best of care, provided only a
scanty living for its owners, were almost inseparable in Walter’s
mind. That Dan had ambitions beyond the limits of his farm or even
beyond the little village of Rodman had not once occurred to Walter.
“School, Dan?” he exclaimed in surprise as he looked at his
companion.
“Yes,” replied Dan quietly, without glancing at the fisherman.
“What put that into your head?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of a fellow wanting to get an education?”
“Why yes, of course,” said Walter, “but I hadn’t thought——”
“Of me in that connection?” suggested Dan as his friend hesitated.
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t think of it,” said Walter hastily.
“But the fact is you hadn’t?”
“Yes, I suppose so. What are your plans?”
“I don’t know that I have any very definite ‘plans,’ as you call them.
Last year there was a young fellow from college that taught our
school. I guess he put it into my head. He seemed to be interested,
and gave me some lessons every night after I had finished my
chores.”
“In what?”
“Oh, in algebra and Latin.”
“And you have been working on them?”
“A little. I had to be busy on the farm all day, and nights were the
only times I had free.”
 “Where do you plan to go?”
“I had been thinking some of going to the Normal School at
Jericho. That’s only forty miles from here. It won’t cost very much
there, you know. If I can get a little money ahead, I’m going to try it
anyhow,” Dan said quietly.
“Going on to college?”
“I should like to. The hardest thing is to leave my mother and Tom
to run the farm. They need me and I don’t know that they really can
get along without me.”
“Don’t they want you to go?”
“Yes. Mother says she’ll sell or mortgage the farm and go with me,
if Tom will go too. She’d get a few rooms and perhaps take a few
boarders and help us that way.”
“Your mother is all right.”
“Don’t I know that?”
“You ought to, if any one does——”
“You’ve got a strike,” broke in Dan quietly. “Better pay attention to
your fishing, that is, if you want to get any fish.”
Conversation ceased as Walter sharply yanked his rod. “The fish
got away!” he exclaimed with chagrin a minute later.
“Of course,” said Dan dryly. “What did you expect? You pulled the
hook right out of his mouth. You don’t think a pickerel will hang on
with his fins and tail, do you?”
“Show me how, Dan,” said Walter humbly. “I believe I’ve forgotten
how to do it.”
“No, you haven’t. You never knew how, so you haven’t forgotten.
Hold on! You’ve got another strike! Hand me your rod and I’ll try to
show you how to handle a strike.”
 CHAPTER II
DAN’S PROJECT

D an took the light rod and instantly let out a few feet of the line.
He dropped his oars as he did so and the skiff swung around
before the gentle breeze that was blowing. Intently watching the line,
he permitted the tip of the rod to drop back until it was even with the
stern of the boat, and then with one strong yank he swung it back
until it was again at a right angle with the skiff.
“Take your rod,” he said quietly, as he handed it to his companion.
“Your pickerel is hooked all right; now let me see you land it. Be
careful of your slack,” he added quickly, as Walter began to reel in
swiftly.
The oars were again grasped by Dan, and he slowly sent the boat
ahead, meanwhile watching his companion in the latter’s efforts to
land his prey. “It’s a big fellow!” said Walter in his excitement as the
contest continued. “It’ll weigh six pounds! It pulls like a load of bricks!
I didn’t know there was a pickerel as big as that in Six Town Pond!”
“Be careful,” said Dan in a low voice. “Let him run! Give him line or
you’ll tear the hook out of his mouth! Not that way!” he added, as
Walter permitted the struggling fish to make swiftly for the near-by
weeds. “If you let him get among those weeds he won’t stop to say
good-bye.”
As Walter once more began to reel rapidly an expression of
consternation swept over his face as he said, “It’s gone! There isn’t a
bit of weight on the line! It must have got away.”
“Reel in,” commanded Dan.
“I am reeling, but——” Walter stopped abruptly as a savage pull
upon his line interrupted his declaration.
 The contest continued several minutes, neither of the boys
speaking. Walter’s excitement was intense, and he stood up in the
skiff to enable him to look for the struggling pickerel.
“Sit down!” ordered Dan a trifle sharply.
“I can see better when I’m standing,” replied Walter. “There it is!”
he shouted as his victim came within sight. “It’s a beauty! It’ll weigh
more than six pounds! It’s the biggest pickerel I——”
“Look out! Don’t let him touch the boat!” broke in Dan, as the huge
pickerel made a sudden rush beneath the skiff. “There! You’ve lost
it!” he added grimly, as the fish tore itself free from the hook and with
a swift turn darted beyond the vision of the excited Walter.
“That’s strange,” muttered Walter, as in deep chagrin he resumed
his seat. “I don’t see how it got away. You couldn’t have hooked it
very well in the first place, Dan.”
The young oarsman smiled a trifle derisively as he said: “A good
fisherman doesn’t have to have a fish strapped and tied to land it. I
told you not to stand up.”
“What difference does standing make?”
“You have to balance yourself as well as handle the rod. Only an
expert can do that. Let me have your line. Your bait is gone.”
As Dan drew in the line and again baited the hook Walter laughed
as he said: “Oh, well, Dan, I’ll soon get the trick of it again. You must
remember that we don’t fish very much in the streets of New York.”
“So I hear,” quietly responded Dan as he handed back the fishing-
rod.
“This time I’ll be careful, Dan,” continued Walter, as he resumed
his seat and let out his line again, while his oarsman sent the skiff
more swiftly ahead.
“You’ll get it next time.”
“Let us hope so. Dan, how is the Rodman nine this summer?”
“Pretty fair. We have a game to-morrow.”