Our Baseball Club and how it won the…

It was an impressive occasion when the Catalpa club started on their first pilgrimage. They had arranged a practice game with the Black Hawk Nine, of Sandy Key, in the central part of the State, to begin the season with. Other games were arranged for later work, but this match, which was partly for practice, and partly to test the material of the new nine, was felt to be one of the most important. From Sandy Key the Nine were to go to Bluford to play the famous "Zoo-zoo Nine," as they called themselves, of that city, and then they were to begin a struggle for the championship of Northern Illinois with the Red Stockings of Galena. How much depended on the result of the meeting of the Black Hawks and the Catalpas, you who have followed the career of a baseball nine can best reckon.

In Catalpa, at least, the game would be watched with great, although distant, interest and absorption. Two or three of the more active promoters of the Baseball scheme were to go down to Sandy Key, which is on the Illinois Central Railroad, to witness the struggle of their favorite champions with the strangers. The Black Hawks were renowned as fielders. They had acquired a reputation that inspired terror among the baseball players of the southern portion of the state; and when it was noised abroad that a new nine from Dean County, heretofore unknown in the Diamond Field, had actually challenged the Black Hawks, experienced amateurs and professional players made remarks about the assurance of the new men from the North that were not intended to be complimentary or encouraging.