cied, doomed never to arrive in any port.

Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was
taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and
concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre
of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's
bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts
welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered
and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.

Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward
with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had
sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing
heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes
glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little
ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)

All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I
was soon to know him by.

I remember marvelling at his excitement.

I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It
must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name
was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about
the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.

At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been
any reporting like it before or since.

I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not
exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was
when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub
it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to
so quaintly was a cut above his job.

But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
him.

All t