To-Day’s Tennis Fable

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 510, 13 November 1928, Page 15

To-Day’s Tennis Fable

2. Of the Man who Should Have Known Better There was once a man who had teen playing tennis for a very long time and should have known better. When he was young and learning the game he used to try to return every ball that came over his side of the net. In those days he acquired a habit which he never dropped. If a first serve was out by five feet or five inches he always, with uncommendable industry,' returned it in a graceful parabola to the server, at the same time calling stridently “Fault." The server cither wasted effort trying to get it back or was sufficiently put off by the return to serve a double. In this way the

man who is the subject and the object of this story won nviny matches, no umpire having tlie. moral courage to say to liis. opponet, “Take two." So some swore and some cursed and some laughed at the man, and some said “FLtEA.SE don't hit the •first serve when it's out." But the man, being middle-aged, and therefore-self-complacent and headstrong (faults rvrongfully ascribed to youth) persisted and never had the graciousness to say “Sorry " So it came to jiass that one da)j this man was dr axon against;; a quick - tempered and desperate young man who, restraining his ire' pleaded many times with the man to refrain from hitting the first. m ball. His pleading teas in vain. At his fifth service the young man’s anger broke lose. He charged from the back line, taking the net in liis stride. Facing the man , -he spoke in wild, and * whirling words, saying., • “O, thou repr.o bate !. How . many. , times hast ; I told thee not- fb hit - my first b'dlfy Which is 'invariably out. Vengeance is upon thee." So saying he - grasped his racket firmly in both hands and swung it over his head and down between his shoulder bladesy as Arthur raised Excalibur ; when he, also, was ridding' liis land of social menaces. It was . a mighty stroke. The j wry found that it was justifiable homicide. : *• - DEX7CE-