Today as the crowds shuffle laboriously across the Anderson bridge, the phantom forms of John Harvard and Eli Yale stalk through their midst, arm in arm, returning to Cambridge after many historic conflicts on the football field. They have met many times before, and in many different situations: in Hamilton Park, New Haven, for the first time, on neutral ground at Spring-field, in Boston baseball parks, in New York, and for years now, alternately in the Bowl and the Stadium. Theirs is the longest football tradition in the country. Between them, they have fathered that ungainly child, the modern game of football. Every year, before thousands of alumni and undergraduates, they have renewed their ancient chivalry, which is no less intense for the tremendous regard the old players have for each other.

Certain phenomena recur so regularly and impressively that they become institutions: the Boston Transcript, the equinox, presidential elections, and the Harvard-Yale football game. Just fifty years ago, Harvard and Yale first matched strength and skill against each other on the football field, playing under rules manufactured for the occasion out of the old Rugby game. No one could have foreseen that that game was to initiate the sport, which now sets the whole nation in a frenzy every autumn. Many there are who now believe that the glorification of football has gone too far. But this theoretical question aside for the moment, the fact is that the Harvard-Yale game, in addition to being a classic, has taken on much wider significance and has become a national institution.

It is hard to picture the opening game of that momentous thirteenth of November, 1875. Fifteen men played on a side in athletic shirts and canvas trousers. The crowd of 1500 was large enough to cause comment then, but would scarcely fill a section in the Stadium today. Still, it was a slashing, spirited contest, especially after the Yale players unfamiliar with Harvard rules, grasped the idea of how to tackle. A particularly desperate scrimmage in the third quarter flattened even the ball into a disk of limp rubber. The best of traditions was established by the presence among the spectators of numerous ladies seated decorously in their carriages. Harvard drew first blood, setting subsequent University teams a worthy example by kicking four goals while Yale failed to score.

In the next few years, the games word played in Boston, New Haven and New York; then, in 1889, Springfield was made the authorized battle ground and the two colleges journeyed out along the post road to meet each other half way on neutral territory. Football was finally beginning to take on a modern aspect with a genuine differentiation between backfield and line. Scouting was not yet a business and sometimes chose picturesque methods. Some enterprising Yale men were wont to observe Harvard's secret practice on Soldiers Field from the Mount Auburn Cemetery tower, until Major Henry Lee Higginson was apprised of the situation and built such a lofty fence in a strategic position that thenceforth the Yale scouts saw nothing but an expanse of pine boards.

The Harvard team caused a genuine sensation in 1892 by trotting out to do battle arrayed in brand-new, shiny leather suits. In a preceding game, the University players had each soaked up thirty pounds' weight of mud and water, and they were taking no chances on the weather. It was the day of mass formations and the famous "Harvard flying wedge". Legs were broken and skulls fractured, and as the casualty list mounted, a cry went up all over the country against the brutality of football. When the last whistle had blow in the 1904 game, the sidelines were packed with players who, among them, had experienced almost every kind of injury known to man. It looked as if the best physical specimens in both colleges were about to kill each other off. A truce was declared and there were no more Yale-Harvard football games for two years.

When the storm died down and the series began again, the teams on which played the late Percy Haughton, founder of the "Harvard system" and noted in his undergraduate days for his great booming punts and accurate drop-kicks, and Major Charles Daly, present University backfield coach, battled Yale to two scoreless ties and divided the rest of the games evenly. Five lean years followed with successive Yale victories until Haughton returned as head coach. Then the golden age of Harvard football flourished until the period of the world war. Harvard seems to have viewed its good fortune with an excess of caution; for, at the beginning of the 1914 season, the Alumni Bulletin felt quite gloomy over the fact that only Mahan, Brickley, Hardwick and Pennock could be counted on among the letter men returning to college.

Harvard-Yale football history since, the war is too recent to require reviewing. The experience of the past two years seems to indicate that rain is as indispensable as the kick-off. People who have attended these community shower-baths will feel an appreciative sympathy to read the chronicle of the 1890 game, when it poured torrents and all the spectators had to take cover under oilcloth table cover and other impromptu ponchos.

Today the bulldog again wears an engaging grin that displays teeth as well as cheerfulness, and John Harvard dispenses hospitality with one hand while he meditatively sharpens his pioneer's axe with the other. This is the time when indifference takes its annual vacation, for the tradition of fifty years f mutual regard and respect is entering on its second half century.