mmer of 1897--I think towards the end of August--I was
whiling away the close of an afternoon in the agreeable twilight of
Mr. D--'s bookshop in the Strand, when I heard my name uttered by some one
who had just entered; and, turning about, saw my friend Verinder, in
company with Grayson and a strapping youth of twenty or thereabouts, a
stranger to me. Verinder and Grayson share chambers in the Temple, on the
strength (it is understood) of a common passion for cricket. Longer ago
than we care to remember--but Cambridge bowlers remember--Grayson was
captain of the Oxford eleven. His contemporary, Verinder, never won his
way into the team: he was a comparatively poor man and obliged to read,
and reading spoiled his cricket. Therefore he had to content himself with
knocking up centuries in college matches, and an annual performance among
the Seniors. It was rumoured that Grayson--always a just youth, too--
would have given him his blue, had not Verinder's conscientiousness been
more than Roman. My own belief is that the distinction was never offered,
and that Verinder liked his friend all the better for it. At the same
time the disappointment of what at that time of life was a serious
ambition may account for a trace of acidity which began, before he left
college, to flavour his comments on human affairs, and has since become
habitual to him.

Verinder explained that he and his companions were on their way home from
Lord's, where they had been 'assisting'--he laid an ironical stress on the
word--in an encounter between Kent and Middlesex. "And, as we were
passing, I dragged these fellows in, just to see if old D--' had
anything." Verinder is a book-collector. "By the way, do you know Sammy
Dawkins? You may call him the Boy when you make his better acquaintance
and can forgive him for having chosen to go to Cambridge. Thebes did his
green, unknowing youth engage, and--as the _Oxford Magazine_ gloomily
prophesied--he bowls out Athens in his later age." The Boy laughed
cheerfully and blushed. I felt a natural awe in holding out an
exceedingly dusty hand to an athlete whose fame had already shaken the
Antipodes. But it is the way of young giants to be amiable; and indeed
this one saluted me with a respect which he afterwards accounted for
ingenuously enough--"He always felt like that towards a man who had
written a book: it seemed to him a tremendous thing to have done, don't
you know?"

I thought to myself that